


Human Nature to Miscalculate

by qualapec



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fatherhood, Gen, Horror, Magic, Necromancy, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-30 01:32:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 32,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qualapec/pseuds/qualapec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cabal was not a man who fancied mistakes, in himself or others. However, it must be acknowledged that some mistakes required a lapse in judgment on two sides, rather than one, where the placement of blame is a waste of good time and justifications.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I - In Which Cabal Miscalculates Severely

To be fair, neither of them really understood what they were doing.  
  
Leonie opened the door after the third buzz. She padded across the hotel room, complimentary Senzan silk brushing against the bandages, compliments of the Princess Hortense. There was a little irritation in the way she tightened the robe. For the first time since exiting the hospital, she’d felt sleep coming on, an exhausted relief from her thoughts of strange necromancers in black coats (or, that would be, one necromancer in a black frock).  
  
When she opened the portal, she was startled out of lethargy by a combination of panic and confusion.  
  
She blinked, feeling very, very stupid, and wondering if her food had been drugged. “Cabal?” she asked the man in her doorway, tall but slight, built like a runner, Teutonic in origin and with looks that could kill.  
  
“Ms. Barrow,” he greeted formally, “I see you survived.”  
  
Leonie opened her mouth and shut it, resembling a gaping fish. Simultaneously, she set her lips in a firm line and glancing at the floor, she said, “I thought you were dead.”  
  
“Are you disappointed?” His expression didn’t change.  
  
“That’s not it and you know it,” she accused gently. “You, you need to speak to the Senzan authorities.” The words spilled out quickly. “Explain everything.”  
  
He didn’t even shift the dark blue spectacles. “That’s not going to happen, Ms. Barrow, and you know it.”  
  
“I should call for security.”  
  
“Probably,” he acknowledged. “A man of ill repute dressed in a long black coat has shown up unexpectedly at your hotel room. I would probably call the authorities as well. However, if you do that, then you’ll never know why I came here.”  
  
“I was actually thinking that I should turn you into the Senzan police like I said I would on the _Princess Hortense_.”  
  
“Are you still on about my profession?” Cabal tilted his head in her direction and the corner of his mouth twitched downwards in a scowl. He shook his head. “Never mind. True. I’d like to mention that that would leave you wondering why I’m here.”  
  
She scrunched her nose up and gave an amateur scowl. “What makes you think I was curious?”  
  
Two fair brows knitted together, then he reiterated pointedly, “A man of ill repute dressed in a long black coat has shown up unexpectedly at your door. I’d think you’d be a little interested.” A pause. “So, are you going to invite me in?”  
  
Now was her turn for the quizzical look and disbelieving tilt. “Would you invite you in?”  
  
“…No, I suppose not,” he admitted. “Damn. I do come with a peace offering, Ms. Barrow.” He reached into his coat, and she flinched a little. Cabal paused, watching her reaction, and chose to withdraw the item slowly so as to avoid self-defense in the form of a heavy object to the head (he noted that the internal decorator seemed to have a fancy for them and that the ashtray to the right of the door seemed like the most likely candidate).  
  
Leonie…again wondered if her food had been drugged.  
  
It was a _pink_ box.  
  
Wrapped with a lazy ribbon dyed in gold and bronzed. It was barely larger than his hand, but Leonie felt as though a car moving at full speed had hit her then dragged her thirty feet. She stared stupidly, mouth agape as he pushed it to the hand (the one most likely to go for the ashtray) and he used the opening to enter.  
  
Cabal resembled himself more as he examined the hotel through carefully guarded eyes. He took a couple of cautious steps in, past Leonie, to a central location where he could take note of the big things – exits, hiding places, where to disconnect the phone line just in case he fouled this up royally and she tried to call security – to minutiae, such as the flavor of tea she drank and how she smelled faintly of vanilla. He was suddenly very proud of himself for noticing these interpersonal details, since it gave him the impression that he was on the right path. If all went according to plan, by morning, he could completely forget about that strange, as-of-yet indeterminate feeling he had for her.  
  
“Are these…?” she fumbled with her words. This was the last thing she ever would have expected. Leonie realized that she really needed to get used to the sensation of the earth realigning itself whenever she spent any length of time around him.  
  
“German chocolates, imported.” Back to her, he took off his hat and sunglasses, letting them rest on the glass coffee table. “Women like that sort of thing, right?” His brother had always gotten things like that for the small army of girlfriends he’d once had.  
  
He turned in time to watch her surprise turn to immediate suspicion. “How stupid do you think I am?”  
  
That reaction was something he’d expected fully. “They’re not poisoned. There are far---“  
  
“Yes, yes,” she said airily, “far more effective ways you could kill me if you wanted to. You don’t seem so inventive as to waste time with niceties. That doesn’t change the fact that I see no other reason why you’d give me food.” She looked at the chocolates. “Nice food. Candies.”  
  
“There’s a reason,” he acknowledged.  
  
“Is it supposed to be some sort of reward for surviving the crash?”  
  
“You could look at it that way.”  
  
“What am I, a dog?”  
  
“…How did that line of conversation turn against me so quickly?”  
  
She raised an eyebrow. “You know, if I didn’t know you any better, I’d say these weren’t poisoned, that considering how awkward you’re being, I’d say you were trying to court me in the same way a tourist butchers a language – you have the basics but the execution is choppy.”  
  
“I’ll keep that in mind for the future,” he replied easily, hoping she didn’t see the nervous tick in his lip.  
  
Leonie opened her mouth again. “Wait, that wasn’t a ‘no’.” She narrowed her eyes. “What are you up to, Johannes Cabal?” Subconsciously, she made an effort to tighten the robe further.  
  
He finally turned to face her. “You…bother me.”  
  
“I…bother you?” She sounded like she chewed the word over in her mouth and relayed it to remind him that it explained not a damn thing.  
  
Cabal took a step, to the side and in her direction, like a large cat. There was a certain grace to his movements that she couldn’t help but notice. “You bother me. I can’t quite figure out what it is. I know the facts of our interaction, and I know that for some reason, we always seem to pull back. I could kill you. You could alert the nearest angry mob to my existence and, frankly, I likely wouldn’t expect it from you. We’ve had the opportunity before, but we never take that final step. Surely that makes you curious as well?”  
  
“I know why I don’t,” she dared, placing the chocolates onto the table beside a cup of tea. “But the fact that you’re even raising the issue tells me that you don’t.” Now…that was a novel and highly entertaining notion.  
  
Some nigh imperceptible shudder ran through him when she said it. “So you’re saying it’s just me? Then tell me, Ms. Barrow, why do I hold back?”  
  
“You’ve said it yourself; you generally don’t kill unless you have to. At the same time, it seems to have become a first pathway for you so I’m not really sure.” Hence her suspicion towards the chocolates.  
  
“Generally, I eliminate threats. You’re not a threat overall, but I think you could be in the future. You could use the fact I hesitate around you. In time, you could hone that above average intelligence you have plus a basic understanding of me to score a lucky shot and best me at my own game. I know you have a moral objection to what I do and have threatened action against me before. Take care, Ms. Barrow, if you were anyone else you’d probably be dead by now. But something in me doesn’t settle right with that idea, and I couldn’t tell you why.” He did have one theory that was going to make the next few minutes very interesting.  
  
She shook her head, presumably in disbelief. “I…you’re wrong about one thing. I don’t understand you in the least.” There was a sigh and a frustrated gesture. “Your mind is simply impossible for professional dissection. I could write a case study on you.”  
  
Cabal shrugged. “I don’t care, as long as you don’t use my name. That being said, given your experiences with me, I think you would have a better time marketing it as fiction. Perhaps a serial in your local newspaper.” He took a moment to wonder if he should be flattered that he was inexplicable by modern psychology.  
  
“Tell me then, now that you’ve shot down my theory,” she was starting to get a little impatient.  
  
Not knowing whether or not that was a good thing, Cabal went on with the plan. Swiftly, but not threateningly, he moved closer to her. Leonie didn’t back away, even if she looked rather nervous at his approach, suddenly very aware of the proximity between them. He stopped a few inches from her, and almost recoiled at the distance between them himself. The last time he’d been this close to a human being for other than strictly necessary reasons had been…many years ago. Until now, he’d looked at it as a distraction, a luxury, and had gazed at base acts with distaste. It wasn’t until the… _incident_ on the _Princess Hortense_ that he’d realized that this might have been an oversight on his part. It was something he didn’t understand, and that made it dangerous.  
  
Now, talking would only get in the way. Instinct would be his best friend.  
  
He looked at her nest of blond curls, gently wrapping around her jaw line in lovely golden ringlets.  
  
Reaching a hand up to finger one was one of the most daring things he’d ever done. Leonie watched his hand out of the corner of her eye, and might of recoiled if it hadn’t been for the look in his eyes. There was nothing hungry or objectifying. Rather it was…sad. Reluctant.  
  
Swallowing thickly, Leonie moved on instinct, too. She brought a hand to his wrist. At first, she thought she would pull it away, pull it down, make him explain to her, but instead she just held it in place.  
  
This wasn’t healthy, she told herself. She had no illusions about changing him, and she was suddenly seeing where this was going in stark, frightening clarity. Probably the only thing that kept her from shoving him away was the thought that he wasn’t doing this for lascivious purposes, that he wasn’t operating on the arrogant assumption that she would just go along.  
  
That didn’t stop her from reaching up to straighten his cravat.  
  
He looked like he almost jerked at the movement. Leonie almost wished he would, wished he would pull back from this. The difference was that in this, she was suddenly finding herself a willing participant, because she wanted to learn more. This wasn’t something she would have expected in a million years, and there he was…standing in front of her with very obvious intent.  
  
Still, he stopped, paused at every juncture, waited for her reaction, testing the waters as much as he could to hesitate the point of absolute commitment. They were suddenly in a standoff quite unlike any they’d ever had, and neither of them really knew what they were doing there, kept waiting for the other to draw first and take responsibility away.  
  
Cabal leaned down; awkwardly adjusted his head to avoid bumping noses, and Leonie closed the distance.  
  
Later, they lay in bed together, both too lazy to be surprised. His hands were cold, and she shivered. He hadn’t struck her as the type to cuddle, but she felt as though it was more that she made a very convenient pillow. Also, she got the distinct impression that he was clinging her to her like she was the only tangible thing in the universe after some great catastrophe had befallen the world.  
  
“You were wrong, Cabal,” she said, breathily into one ear. “I don’t understand you.” Within the following weeks and months, she wouldn’t be so sure that she understood herself anymore, either.  
  
In response, he kissed her neck. Not because he wanted to, Leonie thought, but because he felt like he should. She accepted it for what it was worth.  
  
Cabal made a surprisingly gentlemanly show of staying the night and of still being there when she woke up the next morning. He was fully dressed by the time she awoke to the scent of Earl Grey (with a twist of citrus, she noted) steeping on the coffee table. They didn’t talk, but the afterglow had yet to sour into tension and the silence was comfortable. She drank her tea on the couch with her legs folded gracefully to the side. He sat on the chair cattycornered to it – not the farthest seat, but not close either, a safe distance.  
  
They finished tea and she saw him off at the doorway. He kissed her goodbye, and she had no illusions about what it meant. Cabal left with the illusion that she would be out of his life, that he could ignore the place she’d occupied the next time they met.


	2. Part II – Permanent Reminder

Five months after his time in Senza, Johannes Cabal was storming into the mailroom of the town his cabin technically fell under the jurisdiction of, thoroughly irritated.  
  
The mailman faltered a little at his entrance, but slid a piece of paper towards Cabal before he could snarl some early-morning remark.  
  
“Call for you.”  
  
“This interrupted maximally important research,” Cabal said pointedly. “Who is it from?”  
  
“Didn’t give a name.”  
  
Cabal stared at him like that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. At the same time, he hesitated. There were many parties that could have an interest in his talents, and none of them would probably leave their names with a mailman. They were also unlikely to call him on the phone.  
  
“Call them back and tell them I’m not interested.”  
  
“She said you’d say that,” the mailman replied. “She said that if you felt that way then you could just bloody well go on living in suspense until curiosity got the better of you.”  
  
Cabal’s interest perked slightly in the direction of befuddlement. “She?” He couldn’t think of any women that had his number.  
  
The mailman nodded. “Yep, she. And she said it would save both of you a lot of time if you just called the damn number.”  
  
With a withering glare, Cabal took the slip of paper and marched into the backroom with the public phone. Whoever had called had better be dying, he rationalized, or he would kill them.  
  
Vengefully, he jammed his fingers into the buttons, enjoying the feeling of punching something solid. He steeped in anger as he stood there, tapping his toe, waiting for the caller to pick up. He swore if it was something stupid he was going to be omnicidal.  
  
“Hello?” A soft, feminine voice on the other line answered after the fifth ring.  
  
“How did you get this number?” He couldn’t bother with formalities.  
  
“Johannes Cabal?” He tried to get his brain to work. That voice, he recognized it.  
  
“Leonie Barrow…” he said softly, trying to hide some of his shock, then, “how did you get this number?”  
  
He heard the static sigh. “It wasn’t easy.”  
  
Pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand, he cursed into his palm. “Please, Ms. Barrow, I thought we had an understanding.”  
  
“I understood what Senza was,” she went on. “I had no fantasies about that.”  
  
“Then why are you calling?”  
  
There was a long pause.  
  
“Speak up, Ms. Barrow, I’m very busy---“  
  
“I’m pregnant. Five months.” She blurted the words, said them so quickly he barely understood them. But oh, he did understand them.  
  
Nobody could verify it, but the mailman later claimed that whatever news Johannes Cabal received in the backroom caused him to droop the phone with a mighty clatter.  
  
Cabal scrambled for the phone as it swung on its cord like a man from the gallows. In what was probably one of the most undignified moments of his life, he dropped it once more before finally wrangling it back to his ear.  
  
He calmed himself and didn’t speak until he was sure his voice wouldn’t shake, because he couldn’t think he could have stood to show her that weakness just then. He kept his voice cold, dispassionate. “You’re sure?”  
  
“Five months,” she said again. “I haven’t just been eating a lot of ice cream and fried dough.”  
  
Five months. He did the math in his head and paled considerably. “Why…how…who’s the father?” He was just buying time – he knew the answer.  
  
“You know who, Cabal,” she accused gently, voice barely above a whisper. “Other than you, I had a Mirkarvian boyfriend during my time at the university there, and I know for a fact that it wasn’t him. There’s only one other.”  
  
“Me.”  
  
“You.”  
  
Running a hand through his short, blond hair, he snarled something in an incomprehensible language. “Why? Why are you telling me this now?” There were a couple of different ways that question could be interpreted, and he wanted all of them answered?  
  
The connection clacked as Leonie shifted the phone. “I wrestled with that for a long time. At first, I didn’t want to tell you. I don’t expect anything from you, honestly. It would be nice to have help, but I’m doing this on my own if I have to; that much was clear from the start.” She paused, and he heard her voice crack a little. “You…I decided that if you have no part in the child’s life, it wouldn’t be my fault. It was a choice you have to make for yourself. I have no right to make it for you, and that way I could go on in complete confidence. It took me another month to find out how to reach you.”  
  
Cabal absorbed the information numbly. He didn’t know what to think, what to feel, and his soul was being no help whatsoever. He swallowed. “What…have you told your father?”  
  
“Not the truth,” she answered simply. “And he knows it’s a lie but he hasn’t pressed it. It tears him up inside but he hasn’t pressed it. As far as I know, he has no idea you’re…involved.”  
  
 _Involved_ was a novel way of putting it.  
  
“Well?” She prompted after a long minute. “What do you intend to do?”  
  
“I need to think.”  
  
“I understand.”  
  
His first reaction was justification. “Do you understand that it’s safer if I stay away?”  
  
“You can do whatever you like to.” A part of him revealed the lie in her words – not the truth in them, but the emotion she put into it.  
  
“ _Sheisse_ , Leonie,” he bit her name out, “First of all, I never planned on procreating, second of all, there’s a good reason for that --- other than the fact that I genuinely dislike children. For all immediate understanding, let it be noted that they are sticky and impossible to understand. More importantly, I have enemies. These enemies are creatures from beyond space and time. Any child of mine inherits my enemies.”  
  
She brushed off this rationale with another suffering sigh. “I said you can do whatever you want to. The ball’s in your court now. Take your time to think. If you’re at all interested, the delivery time is in late June.” Then she hung up.  
  
“I hate sports metaphors,” he muttered futilely to the small room, the lonely sound of the connection thrumming in his ear, mind dancing with murderous thoughts of the Senzan chemist that had sold him faulty condoms.


	3. Part III – Cabal Deliberates (and his conscience has quite a bit to say)

“It’s far better for me to stay away,” Cabal spoke calmly, putting on a pair of rubber gloves with painful snaps. He walked to the other corner of his lab, plugged in the extension cord to the bulb above his worktable. “Besides, I can hardly see what part in this I have…” he considered. “Forget I said that. It was uncharacteristically dense. Even I don’t believe that lie.” He pulled his tools closer, knitted his fingers together and stretched outwards. They cracked painfully. “She can raise the child alone. Yes? Of course she can. A child needs the mother more, anyway.” No, he didn’t believe that either. He took out a vial of batch 249, held it up to the light in a check for impurities. “I never wanted to be a father.” The needle slid through the protective wax coating, and he took out a small portion of the batch. With trained fingers, he lifted it to the light and tapped the side. He turned to his audience. “What do you think?”  
  
“I wish I was dead, that’s what I think.” The skeleton cocked its head to the side, macabre grin not changing in the least.  
  
He glowered and his face twisted to better express his displeasure with batch 230 – it had very little human personality, and it contained the section of the human soul dedicated to wretched jokes and pitiful puns.  
  
“You’re no help at all,” Cabal replied, inserting the needle into the blot of congealed blood sitting on his worktable. He waited for the serum to take effect. “Take notes.” Flaws aside, 230 was the only one of his creations with which he would trust an object as sharp and potentially lethal as a pencil. He began rattling off a list of variables for future reference.  
  
The clot of blood did nothing.  
  
Irritated, Cabal stared at it, willing it to move. He took a swab, placed some of the blood on a thin slab of glass as long as his finger. Placing it under a microscope, he observed nothing out of the ordinary. “It’s a failure…” he did not like failure, and no response at all was a step backwards he hadn’t counted on.  
  
“Just like the condom?” The skeleton asked, then laughed, or rather, cackled. How a skeleton could cackle without lungs or a trachea was the biggest mystery Cabal had absolutely no interest in solving. “Oh my, that’s never going to get old.”  
  
He looked up from his work, wondering where he’d put that damn hammer.  
  
“ _Herr_ Cabal---” the skeleton started.  
  
“ _Do you think this is funny!?_ ” Cabal roared. “If you happen to make one more joke about… _that_. I promise to grind you into bone dust and sell it as a calcium supplement! _Is that clear?_ ”  
  
“I just thought you might like to know that batch 249 is escaping out the door as we speak. But I don’t know why I want to tell you if you’re going to be Mr. Grumpy Pants about the whole thing.” Eyes widening, Cabal reeled around to see a flat, crimson blob scuttling across the tile floor and making for the exit. He yelled, a combination of multiple stressors, and charged after it. “You’re welcome!” the skeleton reminded futilely.  
  
He didn’t use the bust of Napoleon Bonaparte this time; extermination instead required the strategic use of a bucket and the incinerator. The one benefit to batch 249 was that it helped him work out some of the pent up energy he’d been trying to wrestle through since he’d received The News.  
  
He called it a day and went for tea.  
  
Over the grandfather clock, the carrion crow was preening itself. Cabal leered at it from his great armchair. Why did the entire world seem to be mocking him this week?  
  
…Because he’d made a very simple mistake and was now dealing with the consequences. For someone as generally competent as he was, there was something laughable about it.  
  
And now his conscience was joining in the fun.  
  
“Is it really my problem? She had as much decision as I did and I made every effort to prevent it,” he countered.  
  
Leonie was just getting out of graduate school. She would have a hard time supporting two people with whatever job she would get. The child wouldn’t be the same size as a small dog forever.  
  
At that, Cabal made a noise. “Well I’m not going to put down my life of crime and settle with her. That’s unacceptable. And my home is hardly baby-proofed.” He felt silly just saying the word ‘baby’, monumentally so. A more dignified term needed to be devised. ‘Baby’ sounded too childish. “Marrying her is out of the question. What else should I do?”  
  
Monetary support.  
  
Cabal nodded. “Easy enough. The carnival made me a rich man. I need to keep a decent amount as a financial buffer, but I can give her most of it. What else?”  
  
Be there for the child.  
  
“No.”  
  
Why the bloody hell not?  
  
“The reasons are called Legion, for they are many. I have a pro-con chart worked out. I seem to have left it in my office, otherwise I’d show you.” The cons far outweighed the pros. “I don’t like children. I make them cry whenever I can --- it’s one of the few villainous traits I’m proud of. As I’ve previously stated, Leonie and the child will be safer the farther away I stay.”  
  
The very fact that he was thinking about that, about their safety, already showed that it meant too much to pretend they didn’t exist.  
  
It was an uncomfortable notion, an instinctive desire to protect, one of said protectorates a would-be foe. He hadn’t consented to it, and he wanted it gone. Unfortunately, his soul disagreed with him.  
  
He hesitated over the last rationale, not wanting to admit it to anyone, least of all his conscience. “A child is something that the universe can hold ransom over you.”  
  
His conscience had nothing to say about that, instead telling him to take it up with his fears.


	4. Part IV – In Which Cabal Meets his Daughter

Leonie didn’t recognize him as she was wheeled down the sterile hospital hallways. She waved the nurse away as she came to a stop near the nursery observation glass. There was a man in a white coat and scrubs standing there, taking quick notes on a clipboard.  
  
Leonie almost passed him over as she stared at her daughter.  
  
“White really doesn’t become you,” she commented, her voice a little too tired, a little raspy. “It makes you look even paler.”  
  
“So I was told when I impersonated the Pope in Spain,” he replied, still pretending to be very focused on the clipboard in his hands. He didn’t like hospitals, and it felt traitorous to disguise himself as one – he had an easier time if he pretended he was secretly mocking them. “I also look maniacal in red, by the way.”  
  
“I’m too tired to ask…”  
  
“I thought nothing could kill the spirit of banter in you, Ms. Barrow.”  
  
She pressed her head against the glass, smudging it lightly. “Something about pushing an entire human being out of me did the trick.” Her human being. _Their human being._ Good god there was something seriously wrong with that notion, and they both felt it.  
  
They were quiet for a long time, staring at the little burrito-bundles of blue and pink.  
  
Leonie looked at Cabal, he was still staring at the nursery with an intensity she’d only seen him apply to a puzzle. She looked back at the nursery, to Cabal again.  
  
“She looks more like a fetal pig at this stage then a human being,” he commented.  
  
Leonie shot a fierce look at him, but he lacked the sardonic lilt that bespoke real insult. She tried to wrap her mind around whether or not that was supposed to be a compliment. Settling on the more likely observation. “It’ll take her a while to fluff up.” Leonie got a little dizzy again. If she were any less tired, the situation would just be too awkward. She’d accidentally made a baby - a person - with a ruthless, if intelligent, sociopath that had once stolen her soul. And he was standing in the hospital with her. “You’re actually in the room? I assume you’re not just a side effect of the pain medication?”  
  
“I’m here.” It wasn’t said in a particularly warm way, not implying that he was there for her emotionally and his presence was strictly factional. “I wanted to confirm.”  
  
“That the child was yours?”  
  
“I didn’t want to tell you I was coming just in case this was a trap.”  
  
She clucked, trying to ignore the statement. While there was a part of her that still very much wanted to see him behind bars, it didn’t seem right after asking him there. It was kind of rude to think she would. “Well tell me, are your doubts settled?”  
  
“I’ll have to wait until she’s older for more certainty.”  
  
“But?”  
  
“Her eyes are my color. And her blood type is B. You’re type O, so her father must have contributed a B.” His expression was unreadable again. “It’s very likely.”  
  
The polar shift hit him right then. He wondered what sick celestial scheme had been devised for him to have a child with _Leonie Barrow_ of all people. On a good day, he was only mildly irritated by her, on a bad day, he pondered homicide. They were polar opposites, unalike in every way, except maybe a sharp grasp of the English language, and they were incompatible as people. His brilliant scheme to get her out of his life was his biggest miscalculation. In fact, this was directly contrary to that.  
  
Logical. Leonie hadn’t expected immediate fatherly pride. It probably would have concerned her.  
  
He reached into the pocket of the lab coat and retrieved a slip of paper.  
  
Leonie took it and considered the numbers. “What’s this?”  
  
“The access numbers to a joint account.” He told her how much was in there.  
  
After a moment, she attempted to shove it back into his hand. “No, thank you.”  
  
He looked confused and affronted all at once. “You can’t be serious.”  
  
“You made that money---“  
  
“ _Honestly_ ,” he said the word insistently.  
  
“---from an evil carnival.”  
  
“Evil is a subjective term. Even by your definition, it was only evil part of the time, less than ten percent. Most people had a fine time parting with their disposable income instead of their souls. It was capitalism at its finest.”  
  
She narrowed her eyes. “How can I accept that money knowing where it came from?”  
  
“Because it isn’t for you, it’s for her.” He motioned towards the infant sleeping, squirming in pink dreams a few feet away from them.  
  
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Leonie mumbled something born of exhaustion. “You frustrate me like no one else.” She bit her lip. “So, I suppose this means you’ll be staying around?”  
  
“No,” he answered simply. “Not in the strictest sense of the term.”  
  
She frowned. “Either you’re here or you’re not---“  
  
“That isn’t going to be the case,” he said it like it was already a fact. “I’ll stop by when I can. I won’t tell you when or for how long; she will know my face.” He ground his teeth together at the look on her face. “Don’t give me that. Staying with you full time is not possible with my research. And you don’t want those two worlds to mesh any more than I do. You know I’m not going to change and I know you aren’t. Imagine a shotgun wedding and me getting a job at the local grocer. We’d kill each other in a week. I’m only being pragmatic.”  
  
“There’s another option,” she said through gritted teeth.  
  
“I’m not turning myself in to the police. That’s _not_ an alternative and if you even imply it again, I’m leaving.”  
  
She rounded on him. “Don’t pretend like you’re doing us such a god. damn. favor by just ‘stopping in’.”  
  
He hissed, “Lower your voice. And no, I’m not deluding myself. It’s ignoble. But I do keep peace of mind in that the time I’m away is devoted towards creating a _better world_.” For everyone, really, not the child specifically - but for everyone. He omitted that.  
  
Leonie shook her head. “You…I don’t want to fight now. I won’t praise you for cowardice, but I won’t report you for visiting her.”  
  
He had to restrain from snapping and reminding her that so-called cowardice had kept him alive long enough to reproduce. “Just take the money.”  
  
After a moment’s contemplation, Leonie said, “On one condition.”  
  
Cabal crossed his arms in preparation for belligerence. “And what would that be?”  
  
Leonie tapped on the glass to get the attention of a honey-skinned nurse. She grinned brightly, grabbed up the pink bundle, and brought her outside. Leonie took the child, face red, dry, squished, and surprised all at once, cradled it to her chest for a moment. She looked at the child with an expression of unconditional admiration and kindness, which, directed towards anybody else, Cabal probably would have been sickened by.  
  
Then Leonie looked at him.  
  
He paled. “No.”  
  
“It’s just like holding a pigskin.”  
  
He looked ready to bolt for the door. “No.”  
  
“Don’t be silly. You were comfortable enough reuniting with your humanity long enough to help _make_ her, you might as well say hi.”  
  
“I…I…” he staggered for the right words. He’d never held an infant before. Not that he could tell Leonie that, but he’d never planned what to do in such a situation. At her unscrupulous gaze, he realized that his only options were to hold the child, admit to her that he was terrified, or flee the country in shame. As the seconds ticked on, the third option looked more and more appealing.  
  
Leonie rolled her eyes and _shoved_ the child into his arms, putting him into a situation where he either had to accept the parcel or risk dropping her. It was a risky move on her part, but she knew from experience that he operated better in social situations when he didn’t have time to think about it.  
  
He held the child uncomfortably- one arm was a little too low. It took a moment for him to figure out what was wrong and adjust accordingly. Cabal stared at her like she was the world’s smallest ticking bomb, which the slightest fumble could lead to the destruction of the entire city. The child squiggled a little, but settled down into her father’s arms with nothing more than a little displeased chortle. Although he hadn’t quite settled on his feelings about her, he did know that dropping the baby would be bad.  
  
“She’s crying.”  
  
“She’s not crying, she’s just a little fussy,” Leonie said forcefully, “you’ll _know_ crying.”  
  
They stood there for a few moments; Cabal feeling more like an idiot than he ever had in his life.  
  
Leonie was smiling, vile tricksteress that she was. “So, what do you want to name her?”  
  
“It’s up to you,” he replied noncommittally.  
  
“You mean you haven’t thought about it in the least?”  
  
No. No he hadn’t. He looked at the child, shrugged his shoulders (carefully) and spewed out the first name that came to mind. “Abigail.”  
  
Smiling, Leonie listened carefully. “That’s a fine name, what made you think of it?”  
  
“It was the first name that came to mind.”  
  
She smirked. “You don’t change, do you?”  
  
“Glacially,” he replied, and then looked down the hallways. Detective Barrow could be sighted at a vending machine on the other side. He looked older and walked with a tired little limp- it was definitely him, though. Cabal didn’t feel like having that conversation. “I have to go.”  
  
She didn’t seem pleased, but she lifted her arms to accept the child.  
  
He did hesitate for a moment in handing her back, his eyes lingering a little too long on her face, studying, analyzing before relinquishing her to her mother.  
  
He turned to leave, stopped, and looked back and Leonie. “Take care,” he said clinically, as if he had to instead of wanted to, and then left.  
  
He stopped briefly for a therapeutic visit to the morgue to collect fresh brain matter. He was feeling celebratory enough to tell one of the cadavers that he was a new father. He wrote the silliness off as a result of the fumes from disinfectant and the slight, uncomfortable daze he was still in.


	5. Part V – In Which Leonie Needs A Babysitter and Cabal Realizes that Babies are Basically like Dogs that Slowly Learn how to Talk

Cabal made due on his promise to step in on occasion, and during the times he visited he found that the concept of fatherhood was greatly exaggerated. Granted, he didn’t commit as much of his time to it as others, but the vast majority of his spare time was suddenly spent in transit to visit Abigail (at first he thought it a joke, but Leonie did actually name the child that). The downside was that his trips lasted at most two days, or were sometimes as short as three hours and his visitations required constant supervision of the main entryways to the house. Leonie didn’t trust him at first, which meant staying in full view of the kitchen while he figured out how best to entertain the humanoid blob that sometimes squeaked. Leonie was sympathetic to his traveling situation, and for the first three months made sure that his time with Abigail was mostly leisure.  
  
But eventually, the strain of working full time and trying to be a mother got to her. “I need a break!” It reached the point where she was even willing to leave her child alone with someone who in another life would have been her arch-nemesis.  
  
He blinked at her. “…Who’s going to watch her?” The idea of someone else in the house didn’t appeal to him.  
  
“You are.”  
  
He stared at her like she’d just collapsed on the floor and started speaking in tongues. “That’s not possible.”  
  
“Of course it is. Just feed her when she gets hungry, change the napkin---“  
  
Cabal’s throat went dry. He neither expected nor planned for this, and he was suddenly horribly unsure about what to do. Uncertain footing was never a position he liked to be in. The undercurrent of it all held the feeling that she was doing this on purpose to make a horrible fool of him, which he did not tolerate, but whenever he tried to grab the proper words to explain that this was a conspiracy all he found were holes in his logic and understanding. “Ms. Barrow, I do not appreciate you doing this without warning me ahead of time.”  
  
“ _You don’t appreciate it?_ Cabal, I haven’t had a day to myself in months. I’ve gone back to work. My father helps as much as he can, but he can’t make it up here all the time. On top of all of that I have to account for the paranoia that inevitably accompanies your visitations, and in all the in-between time you spend days gallivanting off to god knows where doing god knows what.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but diplomatically stopped herself. Leonie took a deep breath. “Either you’re here or you’re not. If you’re not going to help at all, then don’t even bother coming around.”  
  
Cabal nearly left. First of all, he thought giving her the vast majority of his bank account counted as helping –-- apparently not in the world that Leonie Barrow summoned around herself. He stood there for several moments until he realized that he was grinding his teeth. “ _Fine_ ,” he gritted out, trying to keep his voice low. “What time will you be back?”  
  
Leonie looked relieved. There were only a couple different ways he could have responded, and this was the one that wouldn’t end in a screaming match. “I was just planning on lunch and the cinema, then maybe the bookstore. I’ll be back by five.”  
  
Calculating the time in his mind, he decided it was acceptable. Six hours. He could manage to watch his own daughter for six hours. Surging through the emotion that he refused to acknowledge as fear, he reached over and took Abigail from Leonie’s arms when she was offered. The weight still felt wrong, off to him. Too small, too frail to be human. Abigail was getting to the stage where she was very grabby, and he was immediately faced with trying to maintain his dignity in front of Leonie while an infant tugged at his blue-tinted glasses.  
  
“We need to set ground rules when you get back, Leonie.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her independence looked affronted.  
  
“I mean mutual coercion mutually agreed upon. Don’t give me that look, I’m not demanding to control every facet of your life, if that’s what you’re worried about. They will apply to me as well, and you’ll have a chance to voice your concerns. I just think that, given our history, some rules are in order to keep us from homicide or worse.”  
  
Leonie nodded, trying not to take notice of the ‘or worse’ addendum. “Fair enough.”  
  
They were quiet for a moment. Abigail made a gurgling noise. Cabal tried not to look to see if she’d spat up on his coat, straining between his vanity and his desire to not appear vain.  
  
Leonie’s expression softened. “You’ll do fine. I’ve seen you face down scarier things.”  
  
Cabal didn’t acknowledge the compliment. Leonie looked uncomfortable. Instead, she redirected her attention to Abigail, brightening her expression immediately as she bade her goodbye. Leonie pressed her nose to Abigail’s and said something in incredibly high-toned gibberish. Cabal’s sense of discomfort was only heightened. He didn’t want to have to talk to Abigail like she was an idiot. Just because she was incoherent and drooling right now didn’t mean she wasn’t absorbing language at a rapid rate. Still, he kept his mouth shut and decided to raise it during their negotiations later.  
  
Leonie turned and walked out of her small house. Cabal didn’t see how concerned she looked the second she stepped over the threshold, closely followed by a sigh and something that looked like forced positive thinking.  
  
~~~  
  
Sitting on the couch with his daughter attempting to roll herself upright on the coffee table in front of him, Cabal again marveled at how he’d found himself in this predicament. In some places the words ‘feared’, ‘infamous’ even, were tossed around as epithets in association with his name. It was hard to reconcile the image of himself on wanted posters with his current state. If his enemies knew this, he was certain they would lose all respect or interest in him. Something about the thought of getting laughed off the infernal plains by all manner of demon and Old One was not appealing to his ego.  
  
This was the first time he’d been alone with her and he was finding out they had nothing in common except their chromosomes.  
  
What did one _do_ with very small children? It wasn’t something he’d ever had to consider before. He held her, fed her, and jingled his keys in front of her before. Now that he was alone, he was at a loss. He’d been under the foolish illusion that she wasn’t that much work. During those happy times of delusion, Leonie had always been there to take over during the areas that he was still fuzzy on. He felt infinitely stupid, which was not an emotion he was accustomed to.  
  
Abigail wriggled and made a little noise, flailing her arms and legs in unison.  
  
If he didn’t know any better, Cabal would have sworn she was taunting him.  
  
He held a hand in front of her just to see what she would do. Abigail focused on his hands with curious, predatory intensity. Her hand-eye-coordination wasn’t quite equal to her intent and two little hands flailed up to grasp at his long fingers. She was developing quite the grip and with his other hand, he pulled out the developmental notebook kept in the upper right pocket of his frock coat. He took a quick sketch of the shape of her hands, making a note of scale while he did so.  
  
He closed the notebook and ran a hand through his hair; this was silly. He frowned, and moved to pick her up. It was still an uncertain feeling, she still felt too fragile and for the first time in his life he was uncertain with his hands. It was another uncomfortable feeling.  
  
A quick scan of the room reminded him of her gymnasium. It was a small, closed off pen with dangling toys and bells. Frown deepening, he moved over and placed her inside.  
  
Abigail noticed the toys and immediately went about examining them as if she’d never seen them before. Immediate, pure happiness followed. Her moods were sudden and even looming over her and not sure what to do with himself in Leonie’s home, he felt…fond of Abigail.  
  
That was when she started crying.  
  
Like most of her moods, it started with a minor change of expression that could have lapsed into anything. Her face grew red and, like the moments before a judge signed off on a capital sentence, Cabal felt a great dread as her nose and mouth twisted. The first tiny, shrill sound squeaked through and he knew it was too late.  
  
“No.” He made it a statement. “No, Abigail. This is not acceptable.”  
  
The cries rose an octave.  
  
Cabal stood uncomfortably, running a hand through his hair. Then he added, more to himself, “No. This is not happening.”  
  
Abigail’s howls continued, and informed him that, yes, daddy, this was very much happening.  
  
Cabal bent down over the baby’s gym, placing his hands firmly on his knees as he tried to bring his face closer to his daughter.  
  
“… _Please_ …” he spat the word out like it was dirty, “Please. _Stop._ ”  
  
The crying continued, and they were turning into wracking sobs that tore at Cabal’s eardrums and…hurt. She sounded like she was in pain and he didn’t like that. The emotion didn’t feel like something he would feel and he didn’t like it any more than he liked the thought that she was hurting and he didn’t know what to do. He stood there with his arms crossed and one hand pressed into his temple.  
  
“I’m overthinking this,” he declared, running his palm down his face. Maybe she just wanted to be held.  
  
She clung to his jacket as he held her and she cried harder.  
  
Rationalizing with the child wasn’t working, and neither was holding. Changing her was the next logical step. His dignity was challenged by the task, but he’d seen far more disgusting things in his life. He made his way to the cupboard where the napkins were kept, trying to tune out the sound of Abigail’s screaming in his right ear by remembering the tune to Mozart’s _Requiem_.  
  
His unsuspecting left hand opened the cabinet door; so began a long and abusive relationship with Leonie’s cat.  
  
Somewhere along the line, Leonie had gotten a cat. In the time he’d spent at her house, the great tabby beast had ignored him. He’d been pretty indifferent to the idea, a little concerned about germs and the presence of a predator around the infant, but Leonie was college educated and he trusted her to take the proper precautions. Most importantly, it avoided him.  
  
He grabbed something soft that he assumed was a lump of fabric or some sort of pillow.  
  
The lump didn’t appreciate being manhandled and protested fiercely. Five pairs of razor sharp claws imbedded themselves in Cabal’s palm and the back of his hand in and instant, accompanied by a yowling that challenged Abigail’s own wails.  
  
Cabal staggered backwards and the cat held on, exacting revenge one drip of blood at a time.  
  
While he understood that it would not be appropriate to toss his sobbing infant halfway across the room, he didn’t hold the same regard for the cat, especially not one that had violated their treaty. He flung his hand, half in reflex, and the creature was thrown off. It didn’t land on anything hard (much to Cabal’s disappointment). It twisted in midair and bolted off into the far reaches of the house, presumably returning to Valhalla to slumber and feast. He supposed that would save him needing to explain anything to Leonie later.  
  
Cabal seethed. Now, Abigail was still crying, and he was bleeding. Usually, he did not tolerate things that drew blood against him, but getting the incessant noise to stop held precedent over a new cat skin welcoming mat…  
  
He took a moment to put some bandages on his hand, then changed her. The cries didn’t stop.  
  
He ran a hand over his head. _He would not be mad at his child. He would not be mad at his child. He would control his anger._ After a series of impressive mental gymnastics, he found his center and went to the fridge to get a bottle of milk.  
  
Abigail would have nothing of it.  
  
He collapsed down onto the couch.  
  
For a man not prone to accepting defeat, he looked rather defeated.  
  
He started talking in German.  
  
Cabal didn’t talk about anything in particular, he just started talking. Remembering his native tongue had been one of his earliest defiances of his own father’s will, and one of the only things he’d continued to share with Horst when they were younger. Horst adjusted quickly to life in Britain, he adjusted quickly to life everywhere, and a shared language, secret to most British girls and boys, kept them closer during their school years than they would ever be again.  
  
His work was the first topic of rambling; graduated cylinders and tales of experiment 131, a sentient bucket of water that did its best to drown him. He thought a little bit more and started talking about the year he’d run a carnival.  
  
Eventually, Abigail stopped crying. Sometimes children cried for no reason. Cabal leaned his head back in relief as she fell asleep against his shoulder. The German had given him something to focus on other than the immediate irritant. He found that it helped him ride through the worst of it. Not because the language was soothing naturally (to him it was, most people didn’t see it that way), but because it was the first time he’d realized that Abigail could learn to speak German, too. It was a sudden, future connection to her he didn’t know he’d hoped for. He knew it was dangerous to have hopes for what she would really turn out to be like (stress that the youngest Cabal didn’t turn out as planned had sent his father to an early grave) but for the first time, he caught himself envisioning conversations with her in another language when she was older, something they could share.  
  
That was when it really sunk in. This was a commitment he hadn’t been anticipating, that had the potential to interfere with his life and his work. He was now intimately involved with two other people. If he wanted any part in his child’s life, he would have no choice but to accept that --- and it included Leonie.  
  
Intelligence and capability were traits he prided in himself, and he realized that he would spend as much time there as he could spare. The feeling was disconcerting, but he also didn’t think his soul would approve of him running from her; his soul was the only reason he was there in the first place. A part of him sneered at the entire thing, told him it would only last a couple months before his research took over his life again, Abigail and her life with Leonie sinking into the backdrop of an unglamorous scientific career.  
  
Cabal’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t enjoy being told he couldn’t do something.  
  
~~~  
  
Leonie came home to the sound of something sizzling on a pan, a pleasant smell, and a steady flow of German from her kitchen. The first sign that nothing was catastrophically wrong was that her house had not burned down. She took that as a good sign and eased her way into the kitchen.  
  
Abigail clung to Cabal, grinning in a way that made Leonie’s heart soar a little (because when Abigail grinned, there was something worthwhile in the world). With one hand, he held her to his chest while the other shot from pan to pan on the kitchen stove. One sautéed couscous, one held frying vegetables, and the light from the oven implied that a couple of the lamb shoulders were broiling.  
  
Cabal looked up to acknowledge her presence, casting a quick glance out the window just to make sure she hadn’t brought the police with her, but didn’t stop speaking to Abigail. Leonie had three years of German under her belt, and living in Mirkarvia gave her enough of a grasp of the language to follow that he was retelling one of the Grimm faerie tales. _Godfather Death_. She’d never heard him speak it before, unless curse words counted. Leonie told herself she was hearing things when she picked up the slightest traces of warmth in the rough intonations. One, because she’d never thought of German as a warm language, and two because Cabal was the coldest person she knew.  
  
Later, they sat down to dinner, a sort of unspoken agreement between them that said she wouldn’t take advantage of any help he could give, and he would be polite when in her house. They bantered, which was comfortable for them, until Leonie said, “ _Godfather Death_ doesn’t end like that, Cabal.”  
  
He glanced up from his plate, while Abigail set about making a mess of ground peas in the high chair.  
  
“I improved it,” he replied, “and I didn’t know you spoke German.”  
  
“Not very well,” Leonie admitted. “I know enough to know that it doesn’t end with the doctor getting more time on his own life and marrying the princess he saved from Death.”  
  
“Some stories need to change to accommodate for the times.”  
  
Leonie watched him carefully but decided to let it drop. “This means you’ll be coming around?”  
  
“When I can.” There was no warmth to the words. Leonie wasn’t sure what the implication there was. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; more that he was pragmatic and not sure where his life would take him.  
  
“I didn’t expect this much from you, to be honest.”  
  
A force pulled at one corner of his lips, there, then gone again in a flash. “Some things need to change to accommodate for changing circumstances.”  
  
At Leonie’s inquiry as to whether or not there were any problems, he mentioned Abigail’s crying and his attempts to quell it.  
  
“And you say she fell asleep right afterwards?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“…Did you try putting her in the crib and letting her nap?”  
  
Cabal stared at her and then uttered a string of curses that went out of fashion when the Mesopotamian god kings fell.


	6. Part VI – Rules

“All right, where do we start?”  
  
“I have a list.”  
  
“…’Acceptable Reading Materials’? _Frankenstein_ , _Gilgamesh_ , _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ , _The Time Machine_... Cabal, she’s an infant. She’s too young for any of these.”  
  
“There can be supplementary texts, but I want to foster a proper grasp of the English language. Speaking of which, I’d like the next item to be observed as well.”  
  
“’No baby talk’!? She _is_ a baby!”  
  
“Precisely, but we don’t want her talking like one for the rest of her life.”  
  
“Fine. I’ll cut back. And you --- I don’t want you speaking to her in only German.”  
  
“I understand that she’ll be better served by bilingualism. Likewise, I’d like you to support her learning German, since she won’t get any exposure to it at school.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“All right, now surely you want something?”  
  
“Yes. First, you don’t bring your work into my house.”  
  
“No practical application, but I draw the line at my notebooks.”  
  
“No notebooks. No nothing. I don’t want it in my house.”  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous. They’re just notes.”  
  
“Notes that you could leave behind, that my friends could see. It puts me in practical danger for people to think I’m dealing in the Dark Arts.”  
  
“’Dark Arts’? I never thought you one to kowtow to the ignorance and superstition of the masses.”  
  
“I find it distasteful.”  
  
“I draw the line at my notes and my Gladstone bag. I take it with me everywhere, an our situation makes it unfeasible for me to go halfway across Britain to drop it off at my home.”  
  
“Fine. And you can have your coded notebooks. But I swear if I see you working your…craft in my home or around Abigail I will ask you to leave and not come back. Have I made myself clear?”  
  
“ _Crystal_.”  
  
“Also, I’d like you to take steps to baby proof your home…”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Cabal---“  
  
“I said, no. My home is legitimately unsafe for me; an infant doesn’t stand a chance. To give you an idea of how hazardous it is, just a couple years ago the faeries in my floorboards tried to kill me.”  
  
“…Your own house tried to kill you?”  
  
“Faeries in the house tried to kill me. Unsuccessfully.”  
  
“Okay, we’ll put that in the ‘Not in this Lifetime’ column for now. Now --- I don’t want you treating Abigail any differently because she’s a girl.”  
  
“Why would I do something archaic and foolish like that? In this fantasy world you’ve constructed where I subscribe to something as irrational as gender discrimination, have I also been smacked by the urge to conform?”  
  
“Right. Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to for a moment.”  
  
“Besides, you’re the one who bought her all the pink outfits.”  
  
“My father bought her those and they look adorable. Don’t argue details, it’s the spirit of the thing that matters and you know it.”  
  
“This entire conversation is about the details.”


	7. Part VII – Stop the Presses

Leonie Barrow liked to spend one Sunday a month catching up with her friends from secondary school. Most of their group had moved out of Penslow, but four of them had stayed and two had had children recently. They let them crawl around in the pen and Leonie had an opportunity to have lunch with her friends. Sometimes, her father would come from across town to spend time with Abigail. Frank Barrow was good with infants, and despite his original disappointment at Leonie’s circumstances, had settled into the role of doting grandfather quite nicely.  
  
Leonie poured Sandra’s tea while Angela passed the sugar.  
  
“So, tell us, what’s life like with your little terror?”  
  
“Abigail’s wonderful, the perfect child,” Leonie said with a smile. “She hardly cries at all.”  
  
“Sean doesn’t stop,” Sandra replied, rolling her eyes. “I love the boy but he drives me up the wall some nights. I swear there isn’t a peep from him all day but once we’ve all gone to sleep he cries like the French are invading.” She gave Leonie a scandalous look, “Sure wish _I_ had a Mirkarvian university boy to take the edge off every once in a while…”  
  
Leonie sputtered into her tea, a blush creeping onto her cheeks; to her friends, it came across as shy, bashful, a little embarrassed but accepting --- it hid her genuine fear, the name the flashed across her mind and one very big, unexpected night in a five star Senzan hotel. She resisted the urge to meet the look she knew her father had given them at those words. Leonie didn’t know if it was his discomfort at the idea that she’d had intercourse with a complete stranger or worse, if he _knew_ that Abigail’s father wasn’t a stranger at all. It was the only real secret Leonie had ever kept from her father, and the guilt that came hand-in-hand with the idea that _he could know_ , simultaneously trying to keep it under wraps and dreading the day the truth was revealed. Leonie knew she’d made a mistake, even though she wasn’t ashamed of Abigail.  
  
It was who she’d climbed into bed with that she felt deep down, would make her father feel like she’d stabbed him in the heart. Frank Barrow wouldn’t have gotten angry, that she could have dealt with…he would have felt hurt and betrayed quietly. That wasn’t something she could bring herself to do.  
  
“So, did you hear the big to-do from Murslaugh?”  
  
Leonie shook her head. “Can’t say I have.”  
  
Sandra leaned back in her chair, placing her cup onto the plate with a soft clink. “It seems as though they uncovered a necromancer in their midst.”  
  
There was a ceasing of noise from behind her. Her father’s keys were no longer jingling over the infant attendees. She could feel his gaze boring into them from behind, a look that had sent the criminally insane spiraling into confessions after hours of silence and denial. Leonie feigned curiosity as something nervous twanged in her stomach and blood roared in her ears. “Really?”  
  
“Yeah,” Angela shrugged. “It’s all the rage in the taverns and the cafes. Apparently, he was found hanging from a bridge with some obscenities written on his forehead, riddled with bullets.” There was a knowing pause. “His death was ruled a suicide, if you catch my drift.”  
  
It was so very, impossibly hard for Leonie not to look at Abigail. She wanted to run over and hug her daughter even though she was too young to understand. “That’s barbaric.”  
  
“People are people. They get scared and things like this happen,” Angela added.  
  
“Most necromancers are just egomaniacs desperate to be noticed, much in the same way that the church and-or public officials that justified that kind of brutality enjoy controlling people.” Leonie tried not to hesitate too much before she spoke next. It was dangerous to ask, but she had to know to put her mind at ease. It couldn’t possibly have been him. Still, she needed to know the man was fat or brown haired or short or polite or some other antithesis to Cabal. “Do they have a name for the poor fellow?”  
  
“I dunno. Something German.”  
  
An oily feeling of dread crawled down her throat and settled in the bottom of her stomach. She fought a wave of nausea.  
  
“Leonie, is there something wrong?”  
  
She shook her head and put on her best smile. It wasn’t him, it couldn’t be him. “Nothing at all, I just realized we were out of tea.”  
  
Sandra laughed. “I’m up for one more round if you are?”  
  
Leonie blanched. She’d been hoping they’d say no. As she rose to her feet too quickly, she chirped, “back in a jiffy!’  
  
The second she was in the kitchen, out of sight of her father, she clasped a hand to her mouth, pressing her back against the fridge.  
  
It couldn’t be him.  
  
Leonie took three deep breaths and clasped the pot in shaking hands, filling it up in the sink. It helped steady her nerves, and the scent of the plum oolong she scooped in the strainer while waiting for the water to boil calmed her.  
  
There was no love lost between her and Cabal. She’d learned not to expect anything from him. His tendency to surprise her since Abigail’s arrival had perhaps eased her pessimism marginally.  
  
She always reminded herself what he was. When there had been sheets twisted between them, she could smell the faintest traces of formaldehyde that clung to him. It had reminded her who he was, let her enjoy the moment for what it was before she understood the entirety of what became of it.  
  
At the end of the day, she’d known he was a cold man. A brilliant man, a miraculous man, and someone mortally broken raging against the world. At the end of the day, he was a cruel, malevolent force bringing wreck and ruin to countless lives. Chances said that his own life would be among the last he threw away after a life spreading chaos. She respected his genius, he fascinated her…but she could see how his story was going to end from the beginning, and she’d wanted no real investment in it other than to see how far he would go. There was a part of her that thought she’d seen change in him, and she’d ignored it because she didn’t want to fall into that schoolgirl trap.  
  
Or so she thought.  
  
Abigail meant something to him. His work was his life and it wasn’t easy, but he tried to be there for Abigail. More importantly? He didn’t resent the task. There had been plenty of complaining and bargaining, but he fell into it like it was just another thing that he needed to do.  
  
She thought of the locked box in her bedroom upstairs and realized how much his visits with his daughter had surprised her.  
  
He was all dedication. Everything he did, he did completely, and seeing some of that directed towards them was the most she could ever hope for.  
  
Suddenly, she thought of the necromancer lynched in Murslaugh, and she felt angry.  
  
Because it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him, but she hated the bastard for making her worry about Johannes Cabal.  
  
~~~  
  
When three days passed without hearing from him, Leonie tried to keep her unease in check. He could be doing anything, she reminded herself. So she went about taking care of her daughter, hugging her extra hard to remind her that she was there for her even though she couldn’t possibly understand what might have happened.  
  
Granted, that Monday at work she learned that the deceased necromancer’s first name had been Hans and she’d felt better…until she realized that Cabal might have been using a pseudonym. Regrettably, she realized that she wouldn’t feel at ease until she knew he was all right. He’d gone longer periods without communicating with her before, but this one held an extra tension in the coil. Leonie took delight in her daughter’s antics while the needling thought that she’d grow up without a father (who otherwise would have been present) pursued her.  
  
Then Leonie had dreams and brief, terrifying thoughts about how the necromancer had died, Cabal’s face superimposed on the swinging cadaver.  
  
Not too long ago, she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a similar fate had befallen him…the sudden appearance of a personal stake was making her angry. This time, she was angry at Cabal for putting her in a situation where she _cared_. For those three days, that was the worst crime he’d ever committed.  
  
She was making tea on Thursday after she’d gotten back from work and the babysitter left, when her cat, Freud, went streaking out of the kitchen like a grey tornado.  
  
“I see your making one of those fruity concoctions you call tea,” a snide, faintly Teutonic voice drifted in from the open kitchen door.  
  
Leonie looked up, and Cabal was standing in her door like the personification of Death, dressed in all black with a cane decorated with a silver death’s head…she could not have been more glad to see him.  
  
He saw the look on her face and it seemed to make him nervous. “Ms. Barrow, is something wrong? Is Abigail okay?”  
  
“Nothing, everything’s fine.”  
  
He didn’t look like he believed it, but the subject was dropped as soon as he stepped through the door. There was the quick, habitual survey of his surroundings to check for any arcane nemesis he might have or a sting operation lurking in Leonie’s home. Quickly, the glasses were flicked off and tucked into his pocket.  
  
His nose twitched unpleasantly. “If everything’s all right, then don’t worry me like that,” he said as he walked into the living room.


	8. Part VIII – In which Cabal’s Work Comes First

Cabal was high in the mountains of Napal, elbow-deep in yeti intestine and half-frozen when he realized that it was Abigail’s third birthday.  
  
Calling the yeti’s lair a true cave was generous --- in reality, it was a slightly deeper-than-most crack in the icy mountainside, disguised by thousands of matching indentations scattered throughout the landscape. It provided only the sparsest protection from the elements, and Cabal was huddled with his back to the blizzard outside. He would spend the rest of the night there, as it was too dangerous to hazard the two-hour trek back to the village. It would be far too easy to lose his way.  
  
Already on the expedition, he’d almost plummeted to an icy death twice and he saw no need to try his luck a third time. If he’d still had his Sherpa, he might have risked it, but the little man died shortly after finding out the yak he’d attempted to milk was a male. This also brought into question his status as a skilled mountaineer. Darwin wouldn’t have been impressed, and Cabal had been left feeling very sore about being duped into paying in advance for a half-wit cashing in on the tourism industry. If the man hadn’t already been dead, Cabal might have killed him.  
  
So, with nothing better to do until daybreak, Cabal started dissecting, analyzing, and salvaging key organs. He would have preferred to take the entire thing with him, but it stood at well over seven feet and was all predatory muscle. Although he was fit enough, Cabal never could have played a lead role in the Icelandic sagas, so taking the entire body back wasn’t an option. Instead, he was removing the brain, heart, a section of the liver, scalp, and taking a blood sample. That was pretty much all he could carry.  
  
None of this changed the fact that he was freezing on a mountaintop, hoping to see day break over the range that rose like jagged razors from the Earth’s crust, jutting up towards the sky in defiance of time and gravity. It was a place as inhospitable as it was miraculous. It was hostile. It was cold.  
  
Cabal didn’t know why he started thinking of it, but as he began the process of cracking open the beast’s monstrously thick skull, he remembered what time it was in Britain, and that Abigail had just turned three. This brought a small quirk of a smile to his bleeding face under the mask he wore to protect his mouth and nose from the brunt of the cold.  
  
Leonie would probably be making cake, and she’d help Abigail blow them out because the girl couldn’t quite figure out how to yet --- she wasn’t likely to make the connection until her next birthday. He was never one for desserts, but for Abigail’s first and second birthday he and Leonie had shared dinner followed by a glass of wine. Neither of them were heavy drinkers, and both other times Leonie had had to put her glass down to go clean off Abigail’s face, who had decided the chocolate cake simply needed to be crammed as rapidly as possible into the face for proper ingestion. He stood there, watching with a smug expression. Leonie would say something that irritated him, and he’d say something equally petulant in return. Then he’d read to Abigail from the new book he brought her, because it was always a book. She was still at the stage where she was more interested in seeing if she could chew on the book than comprehend it; every time she tried to eat it he reminded himself that she wouldn’t be drooling and incompetent forever and she needed to hit the ground running as far as her language skills went.  
  
These were warm, happy memories to a man that allowed precious few things close to him.  
  
However, upon returning from those kind thoughts the cold seemed even colder and his hands stopped in place as if he couldn’t precisely remember why he was halfway around the world instead of with Abigail. This was irrational and stupid, since he knew exactly why he was there. His movements still stuttered to a standstill.  
  
He snarled and went back to work with extra enthusiasm to compensate for the halt.  
  
He cared about Abigail. It had taken a good deal of mental pain --- like his soul pulling out his teeth one at a time with rusted pliars. He acknowledged that he cared about her. In reality, he’d known it before he’d found the courage to put words to it and it had only taken too long for the conscious thought to first flutter across his mind. After that, he’d allowed thoughts of Abigail to occasionally cheer him.  
  
This was the first time he’d ever let it happen while at work. As an alternative to changing his lifestyle significantly, he’d decided to keep the two aspects as segmented as possible. From the beginning, he’d told himself that if she became a distraction, he’d have no choice but to stop seeing her entirely. He had rules for a reason and it was troubling that she made him feel like breaking them.  
  
He didn’t like that she made him feel like dissecting a yeti was not the most important thing in the world right then. Before him was a humanoid creature he’d been tasked to discretely exterminate by the local government. This was every evolutionary biologist’s dream and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any scientist.  
  
Besides, he never celebrated Abigail’s birthday _on_ her birthday. Leonie usually did something with Frank Barrow that day, brunch or some nonsense. Cabal showed up a day or two later and they celebrated then. Not much was being missed. What was one day, or two, or three as long as he eventually showed up and didn’t skewer himself on a stalagmite left over from the last Ice Age?  
  
Right. No logical reason to feel lousy.  
  
Then why did he feel lousy?  
  
A chilly gust of wind tossed particles of ice into his eyes; in the distance, a chunk of glacier cracked off and thundered into the abyss. It took some effort to stay proud in the face of the fact that he was alone on a mountain with the knowledge that he could be warm.  
  
No, he reminded himself.  
  
No because he’d made bigger sacrifices before. No because it was important, even if it didn’t appear to be so at the time. As it always did, everything that had brought him to that point drove up and knotted into something powerful in him. Missing the occasional birthday was just another price he had to pay --- the reason that he couldn’t be with her all the time was the same reason that he would be absent for some important events as well.  
  
In the grand scheme of things, it was a compromise preferable to giving up his work or Abigail entirely. So he would go on, even if it hurt or his soul complained bitterly, because he was building a better world.  
  
~~~  
  
The next morning, before embarking on the aeroship that would take him back to Britain (after the _Princess Hortense_ , he hated air travel with a burning passion but it was the only reasonable way back), he stopped in a small Nepalese shop and bought a stuffed yak toy. It was soft and something told him she might like holding it. When the shopkeeper tried to ask him why he wanted the toy, Cabal had glowered at him and he’d reconsidered.  
  
His craft was paramount…that didn’t mean he had to like it when it drew him away from the places he genuinely wanted to be.  
  
That being said, the anatomy of a yeti was rather interesting.


	9. Part IX – In which Abigail has her First Day of School but She Learns More at Home

Abigail was given a present at the end of her first day of Reception. Abigail was still slightly confused by the concept of “school,” and was just wondering when it would end when the bell rang and the teacher herded Abigail and her classmates out the door. Outside, she saw that a crowd of parents gathered around the fence --- her classmates recognized friendly faces right away, sprinting and shrieking to meet with mothers or fathers.  
  
Abigail searched the crowd until she found a face she recognized, then ran towards him, ponytail of tow-colored curls slapping against her neck as she sprinted.  
  
“Grandpa!” She howled and barreled into Frank Barrow’s legs.  
  
“Good afternoon, sweetheart,” he said with a wide grin and kneeled down to her height.  
  
“You’re here,” she said, surprised delight evident in her voice. She’d been hoping to see her mother…or her father, but she liked her grandfather, too.  
  
“Very observant,” he replied. “So, how did you enjoy your first day?”  
  
“It’s okay. Some of the other kids are really irritating.”  
  
The accurate application of the word made Frank give the child a double-take. “Who taught you a word like that?”  
  
Abigail almost replied ‘ _my dad_ ’, but her mother had drilled her on the importance of never mentioning her father around her grandpa...or anyone, for that matter. “ _Grandpa_ ,” she said, insistently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I read books.”  
  
Frank paused for a moment and studied Abigail. He saw her mother in her when she got like that, like he wasn’t taking her seriously enough. But when he searched her face for her absent, Mirkarvian father, he couldn’t quite discern the familiar from the alien. “Sure you do, young missy.”  
  
“You were a detective, grandpa. You shouldn’t have forgotten that.”  
  
“’Course not,” he grinned, and they started walking away from the school. “Do you want sweet tea and scones?”  
  
She beamed and tugged lightly on his sleeve. “Always!”  
  
They walked down one of the busy main streets of Penslow. It was a town where everyone knew everyone’s name, and anyone trying to go anywhere got a warm reception from people on the sidewalk. Abigail had a certain shyness to her. After she warmed up to someone, she could converse like someone years older, but there was always a moment where she glanced downwards to hide her eyes from a stranger or someone she wasn’t comfortable with --- usually because they were too loud or expected her to respond with too much, too quickly. He’d catch himself thinking of how outgoing her mother was and question where she’d gotten that shyness from.  
  
Frank Barrow imagined himself slapping an exact copy of his face. He’d promised a long time ago that he wouldn’t dwell on it. Still, his mind did wander sometimes.  
  
“Abigail?” he questioned after they were sitting down in the little café at the end of the street, tea on the way and scones in front of them. She liked blueberry most. It was the only one she could ever be guaranteed to finish. “I got you something.”  
  
She looked up at her name, blue-grey eyes wide, excited, and curious.  
  
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a book, handing it to her.  
  
She excitedly leafed through it. It was about, of all things, dinosaurs. Each scaly beast was brightly rendered in colorful sketches. Details, outlines, and facts were arrayed in paragraphs along with each species. She squirrelled in place, consumed with a state of giddiness and immediate interest unique to childhood. “Thank you so much.”  
  
“I’m glad you like it,” and he was. She smiled, and it reminded him of how much joy Leonie had always brought him. When she smiled, nothing else mattered.  
  
~~~  
  
That weekend, her father visited.  
  
He was like no other man she knew. He always wore suits and long jackets. He dressed in all black, the only sign of white the button-up shirt he always wore under his jacket (occasionally, he’d wear a splash of color in the form of the red cravat her mother had gotten him for Christmas one year…or the bright, multi-colored one Abigail selected when she was four. The latter only appeared very, very rarely).  
  
When he stepped through the door, she ran over to him, and he stiffly drew her into a hug. “How was your first day of school?” He asked as he rose to his feet, looming over her.  
  
“It was good,” she replied in German. “Why do boys act like tiny dogs and why do girls giggle all the time?”  
  
“I couldn’t tell you,” he replied in the same language. “My answer would have something to do with the inherent inferiority of other people’s parenting skills or, in the case of the inevitable brat who sticks a pencil into every orifice for comedic value, eugenics --- but I don’t think your mother would approve of that response, so I’m going to tell you to ask her.”  
  
She smiled wryly. She didn’t always understand it, and she wasn’t always quite sure she agreed, but there was something that amused her about the way he dissected and criticized the world. “I like math. I’m frustrated with reading, though. I already know how to read.”  
  
This got his attention, and the blue-tinged glasses he always wore were smoothly removed and placed into his jacket pocket. “What?”  
  
“We’re doing our ABCs. I can read. I can even read words, not just letters all on their own.” In two languages, no less.  
  
“Mention it to your mother, I’m sure there’s something that can be done about it.” The tone in his voice implied that there had _better_ be something that could be done about it.  
  
Once the hat, glasses, and jacket came off and the Gladstone back was deposited by the door, he began to look much friendlier. Well, he was her father; he was always friendly to her. While they sometimes made her mother uneasy, she was used to his long periods of silence or his occasionally clipped, biting speech. It was rarely directed at her, since she’d figured out early what was likely to pull at his nerves. Unlike most children, Abigail had never wanted her parents to marry just for that reason. She loved them both, but she loved them for different reasons that, even at five years, she knew collided.  
  
She liked to think they had been just slightly different people in another life and that the awkwardness that hung between them didn’t exist. That was the closest she ever came to wishing her parents would marry.  
  
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “Grandpa bought me a book on dinosaurs.”  
  
Her father raised one pale eyebrow. “Did he now?”  
  
“Yes, it’s got all these pictures. And did you know that Tyrannosaurs Rex was a carnivore? Oh, and raptors hunted in packs like wolves.”  
  
A small smile found its way onto his face. “Yes, I knew all of that. From personal experience no less. I could even tell you more, like how important vocal communication is for velociraptor hunting technique.” His face took a slight scowl at the last part of the sentence.  
  
At her confused stare, he indicated the couch, where they sat down and she knew a story was coming. She always liked her father’s stories.  
  
“I was in Peru, high in the mountains when I crossed over into another dimension, one of many just like it tucked into secret and forgotten places in our own. I was looking for a mythical garden for a mythical tree that would give life eternal and cure any wound. Both turned out to be a myth. There was another dimension and there were plants in it, but the word ‘jungle’ is probably far more apt a description for the wild, primordial vegetation that covered the deep, cavernous tomb on the other side. It was once a playground for the Incan gods, but like most gods they grew bored with it and left it to its own devices. The tree was entirely fictitious and I want to slap whatever harebrained Spaniard first made note of it to make his discovery sound more important --- the vast quantities of gold mentioned were also a damn lie. Instead, I found there creatures banished from our version of Earth millennia ago, preserved forever in a bubble ecosystem that would be what they needed to thrive. They tried to eat me…”  
  
Abigail listened in rapt attention to every word, every detail.


	10. Part X – Abigail Goes to the Movies

Abigail liked to think that her dad was a spy.  
  
As the school year came and with it all the family events and teacher conferences and celebrations, for the first time she wasn’t entirely happy relaying the lie that her father was a Mirkarvian graduate student from the university. That was also the year she learned what exactly that implied. She keyed in to the apologetic looks teachers and other parents gave her mother, but it was only really confirmed when a small, petulant boy in her year had used the words “dead as a doornail” at recess one day. She realized that most educated Mirkarvians had been involved in the uprising of ’82 (the year before she’d been born) and most of them had either died or been shipped off to prison camps.  
  
At first, she didn’t quite understand why her real father’s identity was such a secret, why it was such a big deal whether anybody knew he still visited them, why he never interacted with the other parents or came to parent-teacher conferences or made anything for the bake sale. It hurt, a little, to want to share him with her friends and not be able to because the father they knew her to have was supposed to be some martyred revolutionary in a land she’d never even seen a picture of.  
  
Towards the end of the year, however, the class had gone out to the movies to celebrate a year of hard work --- a field trip to the silver screen. It was a movie about espionage, cunning, and heroism. A suave, brave lead in a suit foiling every villainous scheme, drawing some gadget from a compartment on his shoe or a book and creating a way out when the situation seemed impossible.  
  
Abigail realized. Her father was a spy.  
  
It was why he couldn’t live with them, why he came and went with no indication that he’d ever been there at all. ‘Johannes Cabal’ was probably his only real name in a long list of aliases and fallacies. He may have even loved Leonie Barrow at one time, but the call of his job drew him away from a normal life. He was out doing good things, brave things, for a cause higher than his own safety or happiness. Her mother was always worried for him because people wanted him dead, clearly. She thought of all his wonderful stories from far flung places, and suddenly realized with full certainty that they were all real --- stories about cities rising from the water, vampires too noble for their own good, and a man who tricked the Devil.  
  
Then the villain of the movie showed up. A tall, handsome German in a long, dark jacket, stern and pale.  
  
There was something about the villain’s intensity, his cold, calculating gaze on the screen that made her wander that, if her father was a spy, he was on the side of all things malevolent and evil. He was, after all, a man with a foreign accent in a long black coat.  
  
No. That was silly thought and she squashed it immediately like a disruptive bug buzzing around in her mind. Her father had to be at Her Majesty’s Service, through and through, anything else did not even warrant consideration. She planned never to mention it to him, but she left the movie theatre with her class in the pure, powerful illusion of being a cog in a network dedicated to truth, justice, and the British Empire. She no longer cared when he wasn’t there, because she knew he was off doing great incredible things and maybe someday, he’d teach her how to do them, too.


	11. Part XI – In Which Things Come to Pass

Trouble came when Abigail was seven and when Cabal expected it least.  
  
He’d never been the type of person who trusted his fortunes to the universe. Luck was fickle and treacherous. A heightened sense of suspicion had saved his life more times than he could count; it was uncharacteristic of him to let his guard down, and yet that’s exactly what he did. His conscience would never forgive him for it, as it turned out.  
  
Maybe it was because he’d had a long period of travel, five years of no trouble had lulled him into a false security, or because he just hit a dead end in his research that set him back several months’ worth of lab time and that’s what he was thinking about as he walked up the hillside within the city limits of Penslow to reach Leonie’s house. The sky was darkening the gray clouds overhead as he padded across the flat stones lining the side of the gravel driveway that, as far as he knew, had never gotten any use by a car. Autumn was beginning to descend, the first of the leaves turning as a slight bite entered the air. Cabal honestly preferred it to summer or the dead of winter, the weather had interesting changes without being extreme.  
  
As he approached the front door, he stopped short, something nervous prickling at the corners of his conscious mind.  
  
It was open. It wasn’t unusual for Leonie to open the doors and windows during summer. His eye for regularity versus abnormality drew attention to the fact that it was almost night time during the first chilly evening of the year and that the lights in the house were off.  
  
He froze in place, keen sense for danger flaring ominously. He removed his blue-tinted spectacles and surveyed the small white home he’d frequented in recent years.  
  
Something was wrong.  
  
His first instinct was concern that he didn’t allow to mature into full-fledged panic, instead it concentrated into the thought that _they were in danger_. He pulled his Webley from his Gladstone bag, drawing back the hammer and taking his first step towards the dwelling.  
  
Then he stopped, forcing himself to just sit still and think it through; for once, he didn’t want to, and his fingers clenched anxiously at the handle of his gun while he rolled on the balls of his feet and prevented a headwords charge. The possibility of it being a trap crossed his mind. That thought calmed him considerably, and his grip on the weapon relaxed. If it was a trap, then he had several calculated risks he could make. On one hand, it was a trap laid by one of his enemies, and he…wasn’t sure what he would do then. Worse, it was probable that Penslow upon Thurse had grown aware of the necromancer visiting their town.  
  
He had sudden flashes to the poem about the highwayman lured into the arms of the military because of his frequent and predictable visits to a young woman. In the poem, they had arrested her, established themselves in her home, and waited for the highwayman to appear for her like he always did.  
  
In the poem, the girl had shot herself with the captain’s service pistol, effectively warning the outlaw of the ambush. He joined her later --- they always did in those high romances.  
  
He weighed his options. If half the Penslow police force was waiting inside that building then his only option was to run. The people of Penslow wouldn’t do any permanent harm to Leonie or Abigail. She would know most of the officers either through her father or her job. Penslow was like a giant family at the worst of times, badly knit sweaters and drunken uncles alike, and he doubted that any of them would harbor her ill will no matter what she did or what dogs she laid with. In that event, his only priority was to preserve his own life, which would no doubt end in jail or at the hand of a trigger-happy beat cop if he attempted to enter.  
  
Nothing was so polite about the alternatives.  
  
If it was some sort of former enemy or preternatural threat…he knew it would be less kind to them than the mortal police force. He stifled a suffocating thought, a flashback of already being too late that stung like a steel cord around his throat.  
  
Slowly, carefully, he approached to further observe. Ideally he would have retreated and watched the house from a distance, but if time was of the essence he needed to investigate.  
  
The door had clearly been forced open.  
  
He heard a painful groan --- immediately recognizing the voice as Leonie’s. The Webley was pressed against his thigh, obscured behind the tresses of his frock coat and his back against the wall.  
  
He took in the next few details in a very ordered and clinical matter. He noticed the blood seeping onto the floor first, and the fact that Leonie was lying in it, clutching something soaked in red to her shoulder with one hand. He could see the smears from where she’d tried to drag herself across the floor to get to the phone. She was still moving, still alive, but her actions were futile and counterproductive. He automatically calculated every data point into determining how long she would live.  
  
He observed without observing, placed his gun back onto the coffee table and gently padded towards her. “Ms. Barrow, can you hear me?”  
  
She blinked, blue of her eyes suddenly forcing to focus, stark against the flush to her skin. Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times while she found her voice. He was already bending down to her side, fishing inside his Gladstone bag for something to keep the bleeding in check. He tugged at the dish towel. “Let me look at it,” he said, keeping his voice soft. A spark of recognition glanced across Leonie’s face. She grimaced, one blood soaked hand grasping onto his coat when he yanked away the cloth and tossed it aside, a silent cry on her lips.  
  
Cabal’s first thought was that whatever had gotten her, it hadn’t been very thorough about it. There was one puncture wound on her shoulder --- it had somehow missed the vital arteries there. It wasn’t a knife wound; the tearing implied some sort of large tooth. “Leonie?” he said, pressing the bandage against her shoulder to stop the bleeding, placing one underneath and binding them with speed that would have astonished a field medic. Leonie cried out, stunned out of her daze by the pain in her shoulder.  
  
“Cabal?” she slurred.  
  
“It’s me,” he replied. “Can you tell me what happened?” He kept his voice calm and capable. He’d never been in a situation like this before with Leonie and Abigail and briefly wondered if he should be panicking, if anything could be gained from it.  
  
She coughed weakly, resting her head on his forearm. “It took Abigail,” she spewed the words out as though she’d just remembered how significant they were, that that was the first and most important thing that needed to be said.  
  
Cabal’s heart fell cold. “What took Abigail?”  
  
“It was a...lizard. It had feathers.”  
  
“It bit you?”  
  
She nodded. “Just…walked right in. It didn’t even pause at the door.” She winced, curled in on herself again. “Quite…impolite.”  
  
“Cabal?”  
  
“Hm?”  
  
“Am I dead?” her eyes weren’t quite focusing on him properly, and he couldn’t quite pin the emotion in her voice. “Because you’re asking a lot of questions. And I know you asked Cacon questions, too…You’re sure?”  
  
“Not yet. I’m trying to prevent that.”  
  
“Please, just be honest with me.”  
  
“Never,” he replied, “can I promise you that. But I promise you’re not dead. --- Hold that. I’m going to walk over and call the paramedics. --- What was it you said bit you?”  
  
“A…” she faded out a little bit, and Cabal lightly rubbed her forehead to bring her attention back to him. “A big lizard with feathers.”  
  
“A plumed serpent,” Cabal said. “A basilisk. I’ll inform them that you’ve been injected with a powerful neurotoxin. Fortunately, it’s very similar to cobra venom and the serum should be available.” He thought of how the puncture mark had gone all the way through. Usually, the first bite was lethal within a few minutes given the sheer size of the creature. That was probably why it had left her alone after the first bite. One should have been enough to finish it…but she hadn’t caught a full dose of the venom. If she had, they wouldn’t be having this conversation or they would be having this conversation on borrowed time. Actually, it probably would be called “stolen” time. He rose, dialed the emergency services, and relayed the information before hanging up.  
  
He would have to go before the authorities arrived. Not only did he not enjoy answering awkward questions about crimes he did not commit, he couldn’t afford to spend the rest of the night in a jail cell. Wasting time telling the truth when it wouldn’t be believed was as useless as puerile lies. More likely than not, Abigail didn’t have that kind of time.  
  
“Leonie?”  
  
She coughed in response as his hand tucked under her cheek and lifted her head upwards, wincing at his touch in what must have been a wave of excruciating pain.  
  
“Leonie, you have anywhere from five to twenty minutes to live, depending on how much venom entered your system. I’ve done what I can and if you can last until the medics get here, you should live.” There was no warmth, no love in his voice, no promises of safety and security, just coolly relayed facts. “Leonie, there’s something I need you to do for me right now.”  
  
A small stream of dribble fell out of her mouth and onto his palm as she fought the rising flood of paralysis. Recognition came and went of the tall man holding her head in one hand, as did sudden, intense flashes in which she knew who Abigail was and why it was important that they get her back. They sparked and flared and faded behind her eyes, and every time it was a little bit faster, more understated and less clear.  
  
“Leonie,” Cabal said again, more firmly. “It might be too late for you. I don’t know. I hope it’s not but even if it is, you can help me find Abigail. I need you to give me more information so I can bring her back.”  
  
“The police---” she trailed off, not quite sure where she was going with that sentence.  
  
“The _police_ ,” Cabal said pointedly, “are not going to be able to help with this. I need more.”  
  
“Just took her. Picked her up and carried her off…”  
  
“Think harder. A basilisk is a summon, so it’s probably bringing her to its sorcerer master, so think of landmarks large enough for a person to live --- a cave, an abandoned building, anything that can cut the time of my search.”  
  
“I don’t know…I just…” Something else crossed her mind, blue eyes widening and contracting as she grasped for a single thought. “The outskirts of town. The abandoned mill, probably, from when the factories moved to big cities. It was slow, big. Nothing that people wouldn’t notice in broad daylight so it didn’t go through town.”  
  
She shivered and curled into him. The gesture was tiny, harmless, and he was struck by the urge to stay with her. Leonie didn’t deserve to die alone. Death was death to him, but he knew what cold expanses lay beyond and it felt wrong to him that she die alone, gushing onto her floor. He’d seen it before and was hoping this time would be different.  
  
“Can you promise me you’ll bring her back?” It was whispered into his hand.  
  
“Yes,” he replied, and she was comforted enough to loosen her grip on his hand. She’d seen him do miraculous things before. If he said he was going to do something with that tone in his voice, she believed he would do it. Unspoken, he added thoughts of what he would do to the orchestrator of this trespass against him. Murder wasn’t even the half of it. He’d glimpsed the levels of Hell, and he felt himself drawing on them for inspiration.  
  
He drew away from her, taking his revolver off the coffee table as he made for the door and the wail of sirens sounded. Briefly, he looked back on her shaking form.  
  
 _Rage._  
  
Cabal was alight with a fell rage as he stepped through the door and disappeared, not sure what he would return to.  
  
~~~  
  
The purpose behind whatever his daughter had been stolen for remained elusive, and he didn’t care. All he needed to do was find Abigail. Motive was something that could be tortured out of the perpetrator later. Planning-wise, he planned on starting with the fingers and toes and seeing where creativity took him before finally making the bastard a fixture among his other failed experimental subjects…  
  
Before he could enslave anyone body and soul, he needed to find them.  
  
After locating the mill, seeing the gentle light burning from within, and spying no less than three dark-cloaked figures making their way in and out over the course of an hour, always coming back with different supplies he determined he was dealing with a _ménage a trois_ of witchery. They walked like zombies, mechanically going about each task in preparation, personality stripped to complete the common goal. He wasn’t able to spy the basilisk. It was there, though; he could smell something akin to a chicken coop from the bramble thicket he was hiding behind.  
  
There was a part of him that desperately needed to confirm that Abigail was in there before he made any sort of plan. He didn’t know where she was, and that meant each possible movement on his part held greater margin for error. Here, error meant a failure that would rip something out of him he wasn’t prepared to lose.  
  
If he went in now and unprepared, his chances of survival and success could have been summed up by the _poema ad memoriam_ , “The Charge of the Stupid Necromancer”. Between the reptile and the three vegetative practitioners, there was no labyrinth of diabolical geniuses awaiting him for a battle of wits. All he needed to do was tread carefully.  
  
Besides, he had until the Witching Hour to prepare.  
  
From a payphone, he called in a tip to the police department that would send the gathering search parties in a direction opposite from the mill. Liberating a mirror from the local hardware store proved comically easy…so much so that he left the pay amount (plus change) on the counter as he exited.  
  
The graveyard was his last stop.  
  
~~~  
  
Francis Barrow exited the hospital to get some fresh air. In the worry of the last few hours, he’d forgotten the time. It was well past midnight, well past the time he would have been asleep. Anxiety had wired him to the point that he was exhausted without wanting to sleep in the least. He was too afraid of what he would wake up to.  
  
Experience was clawing at him, and for the first time he felt the bitter chill of old age laced with suffering that was all too familiar to him. He was wracked with memories of how he’d lost his wife at the same hospital. _Twenty-Five-Percent_ chance of survival didn’t seem like nearly enough of a buffer. It felt more like walking on thin ice, with a deep, sorrowful oblivion on the other side of a crackling membrane.  
  
 _Abigail._  
  
He thought of a victim’s chances of survival in the hours after a kidnapping --- he thought of what her kidnappers could be doing to her, and it made him sick. The notion that he might lose his daughter and his granddaughter simultaneously terrified him.  
  
He’d never been a deeply religious man. There was pragmatism in him that demanded attending to matters on Earth as best he could before worrying about the afterlife. Why spend time praying when it could be spent _doing_? There wasn’t a single thing he would have done differently in his life knowing for certain what the end held. He had done no more than live his life.  
  
He massaged the sore spot on the back of his neck. If he stayed out there much longer, he’d either end up praying, smoking for the first time in fifteen years, or offer the Devil his soul. None of those appealed to him for different reasons.  
  
On a whim, he looked up into the night.  
  
A haze that wasn’t quite fog had settled over the city, adding a frosty halo to the gaslights on the street. He saw something shift in the shadows, a steady, repetitive motion that took the form of a man in a long coat as he stepped into the light.  
  
Frank’s heart caught violently in his throat as he took sight of the man, before his gaze fell to the child he carried. She wore a tattered, dirty dress, and clung tightly to the man’s side, face buried in his neck.  
  
Cabal stopped a couple feet away from the former Detective Barrow.  
  
They stared at each other.  
  
Frank swallowed thickly, and his voice came out in a broken lilt. “I never knew. I always suspected but I never knew until now.”  
  
Cabal was far too tired to feign ignorance. “…What tipped you off?”  
  
“Lots of things, I suppose. When she told me you were on the Princess Hortense just before I didn’t know what to believe. They were all things I didn’t want to think were true.”  
  
“If it makes you feel any better, Detective Barrow, neither of us really knew what we were doing.”  
  
“Grandpa.”  
  
Cabal adopted a slight tic in the muscles of his neck. “Beg your pardon?”  
  
“I go by Grandpa now.”  
  
There was a breadth of time where Cabal studied him incredulously, trying to figure out whether it was meant to be a joke or not. “How is your daughter?”  
  
Frank scowled, and couldn’t figure out why he was angry that Cabal had the gall to ask him that, “They don’t know yet. It’s touch and go.”  
  
He could have sworn that Cabal looked angry at that thought. “I loathe doctors for simplistic, deflective phrases like that.”  
  
Now, Frank felt a hot rage course through him at that man’s insolence. “Those doctors are trying to save her life.”  
  
“They had better be trying hard enough,” Cabal replied, and there was something cold there. “Here,” he motioned with his head to Abigail, awake but strangely silent. “Take her.”  
  
He accepted Abigail into his arms when Cabal handed her to him. Weight slipped from the other man and onto him, and he found the burden comforting. He took a moment to press Abigail’s head close to his. No matter how he felt about Cabal, this was a great gift.  
  
The other man observed them, an unreadable expression on his face --- as if he simply didn’t know how to communicate between his face and his emotions.  
  
“The people that did this,” Frank began, holding Abigail close to him, “the people that hurt them, are they dead?” Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.  
  
“Yes,” Cabal replied sharply. When the detective in Frank opened his mouth to reply, Cabal cut him off, “ _Not_ by my hand.” His lips twisted into something unpleasant. “Not for lack of means or motive on my part, but they were killed by their own dabblings in arts they didn’t understand. Rest assured, if I’d had my way…they would have gone the way their damned pet did.” That is, distracted by its reflection in a mirror moments before a high-caliber bullet pierced its tiny brain.  
  
“Were they operating alone?”  
  
“It would be naïve to assume they weren’t --- they bore too many symptoms of stupidity to have been acting on their own. No definite leads, but I’ll have some house calls to make.”  
  
Frank processed the information numbly.  
  
“And if Leonie lives through the night, tell her I won’t be coming back.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I said,” Cabal reiterated breathily, as if irritated, even as something else lurked underneath it. “I’m leaving. At first, I thought it was selfish of me to want to stay away from Leonie and Abigail entirely. This has proven itself a falsehood. My visits have put them in danger, and I never should have allowed it to happen. What have I been crafting here but an illusion of real fatherhood? Wrapping my mistake in a security blanket and acting like she needed me…Yes, I’m leaving. I won’t be coming back and it’s for her own good.”  
  
“If I wasn’t holding my granddaughter in my arms,” Frank Barrow replied, anger evident in his voice, “ _I would beat you half to death_ , you arrogant sod.”  
  
“I’m doing the thing I want to do least. Besides, it gets me out of their lives, _de facto_ your life. I thought that would make you _happy_.”  
  
“I don’t want you here. That’s not the point. It’s _not_ the noble thing, and I hate you acting like it is,” Frank ground out. “Her mother is in that hospital fighting for her life, your child is going to have to live with what that nightmare did to her, and you have the _damn gall to feel sorry for yourself_? I knew you were despicable, necromancer, but that is _low_.”  
  
Cabal’s teeth clenched together, and a muscle in his jaw jumped violently. He was searching for a retort, a counterargument, but none was to be found.  
  
He turned to leave.  
  
“ _Cabal_ ,” Frank Barrow’s voice rose an octave in anger, “I might even have been able to forgive you for everything else you’ve done, but if you walk out on them now, you had better stay gone. If you come back…I will kill you myself.”  
  
“Do. You. _Mind_?” snarled Cabal. He whirled around, and for the first time removed his other hand from where it was held to his stomach; it was soaked with a liquid almost black in the gaslight. “I am bleeding rather aggressively from a wound in my stomach, and I must see to it before she’s without a mother _and_ a father. Important decisions can hardly be made during shock. _If I’m alive_ , I’ll be back in the morning. I won’t promise any more.” He paused again. “I do hope Leonie is there when I arrive, if that makes any difference to you.”  
  
Frank Barrow watched him go, and wondered what kind of wounded man would leave the steps of a hospital if he thought he could bleed to death.  
  
On top of everything else, he was filled with hurt and questions that needed to be answered. There were so many times he’d suspected, so many times he’d looked at Abigail and seen _that man_ in her that he could have just said what was on his mind. Leonie had never lied to him before; that simple truth was secondary layer that hurt as well.  
  
He didn’t know how he would handle it if he never got the chance to ask her directly.  
  
~~~  
  
Leonie didn’t recognize where she was at first. The room wasn’t hers, and she stirred from a sleep that didn’t feel like a normal sleep, it was more like a struggle through a sticky fog instead of a peaceful rising.  
  
“Leonie?”  
  
She smiled at the reassuring voice. “Dad.”  
  
It was only when she remembered that Abigail should have been there that everything made itself apparent. “Dad,” she said, voice thin and panicked as she tried to sit up and a wave of pain and nausea came over her, “where’s Abigail?”  
  
Frank Barrow pressed a hand against hers gently to keep her down. “She’s fine. She’s sleeping.”  
  
Leonie was relieved when she saw her daughter sleeping in the great armchair in the corner of the room. There was a little scrape on her knee, but other than that she was unharmed. “Thank, God,” Leonie breathed. Leaning back into the pillow and sheets made her want to go back to sleep.  
  
Frank Barrow was happy to see that his daughter was all right, and he had no desire to test his fortunes.  
  
However, some things needed to be addressed.  
  
“She’s fine. Her father brought her back.”  
  
Leonie’s eyes widened and her left hand clenched the sheet under her palm unconsciously. “Did he now?” The words came out calmer than she felt.  
  
“Yes,” Frank took a deep breath. “If you don’t want to talk about it now, I understand---“  
  
Leonie’s head was still swimming, but she was also scared; her brush with a monster had made her realize a few startlingly important things, among them was the idea that she could die without telling her father the truth, and she didn’t want that. “I wanted to tell you so many times. I always lost my nerve.”  
  
“I don’t understand it,” said the man who had made a lifetime making sense from nothing. “He didn’t force you in any way?” his voice took on a steely edge that would readily transform into pure rage.  
  
“No, it wasn’t like that.” Leonie’s voice had a sad undertone, and he got the impression that she was thinking about the past. “We had no idea where we stood and it went too far. That’s not the best reason, it’s not even a good reason, and that’s how it happened.”  
  
“Sometimes it goes that way,” her father admitted into his folded hands. “But it wasn’t just that, was it? He’s been coming around.”  
  
“…Yes. He was there when she was born. He’s visited her frequently since then. Whenever he can, I think.” Leonie squeezed her eyes shut, and spoke quietly so Abigail couldn’t hear. “He’s not a good person. I know that. He’s petty and cruel. I’ve seen him do truly heinous things to others and himself. All the same, he’s not a sociopath; he is capable of caring for others. I’m not sure how far I’d push that, but he cares for Abigail. I’d bet my life on that.” And she had. She fought back thoughts of how he’d calmly laid down her chances of survival like Tarot cards on a table. “Was he all right?”  
  
Frank shifted uncomfortably. “There seemed to have been a struggle. He was wounded; wanted to take care of it himself.”  
  
Leonie looked concerned.  
  
“Do you love him?” The word felt wrong, tasting like ash in his mouth.  
  
Leonie was surprised she had to think about it. “No. I don’t. At this point, though, I consider him my friend.”  
  
“Nothing good can come from that,” Frank replied. “You’re in a hospital, my granddaughter was kidnapped, all because of his- _his dealings_. There’s something _wrong_ with him. For God’s sake, you admit it!” He was disappointed, and trying unsuccessfully to hide it. Amazingly, what he found most disturbing was that Cabal had been frequently coming around for the better part of a decade; he’d not noticed, Leonie had frequently lied to him (which hurt him deeply, since she never had before), and Abigail was already being taught to be a successful liar.  
  
“I wasn’t going to be the one who kept him from her --- honestly, in the beginning I was hoping he’d do that himself. I don’t know whether it’s turned out for the better, but he probably has a better relationship with her than he does anyone else.” She smiled. “Abigail does love her father’s stories.”  
  
He heard the tired note in his daughter’s voice, and he controlled his instinct to interrogate. He knew the most important things, everything else could be settled when Leonie was feeling better. More immediate was information on why she’d been attacked, and consoling his desire to see Cabal locked up with the ties that now bound them complicating things. Besides, he had no direct proof of Cabal’s involvement in necromancy on hand, therefore less motivation to turn him in.  
  
He just didn’t understand.  
  
“Dad?”  
  
Frank met Leonie’s searching, clear eyes.  
  
“You’re not mad?”  
  
Without hesitation, he placed one large palm on the side of her head, and leaned over to kiss her forehead just like he did when she was little. “I forgave you before it even happened. I’m just glad to have you here. I love you and Abigail both. Nothing could ever change that, not who her father is or how it happened. You’re both safe, everything else is details.”  
  
Leonie cried into his arm. He let her.  
  
~~~  
Abigail woke up sometime after Leonie went back to sleep, but she stayed quiet, sitting at Leonie’s bedside with her hand around her wrist. Frank Barrow wasn’t quite sure how to handle that silence --- at the station, he’d never been the one to interview the children --- so he hoped the words would come with time.  
  
A chill went down his spine when he heard someone enter the room.  
  
“ _Guten morgen_.” He recognized that chilled voice.  
  
“ _Grusse gott_ ,” Frank Barrow replied with the Austrian, fully knowing Cabal’s standing with God.  
  
When he looked up, Abigail’s eyes were wide.  
  
He heard a sigh from behind him in the tone of ‘fate is pissing in my eye today and I want it to stop’. “It’s fine. Your grandfather, the brilliant detective, figured it out after the better part of a decade. He’s proven his mastery of deductive reasoning.”  
  
Frank bit his tongue, instead choosing to glare at the man standing in the doorway. He wondered if Cabal was just pushing buttons to see how far he would go. The glare, he hoped, would show Cabal what a mercy it was that he wasn’t denouncing him in front of her right then.  
  
Then Abigail ran over and threw her arms around Cabal. He had to look away.  
  
“Stop antagonizing him, Cabal, we’ve been through enough.” During the commotion, Leonie woke up.  
  
“The day is young; I got very little sleep last night and skipped tea this morning. Antagonism may well be the only thing keeping me on my feet after all the nobility.” His voice was sharp and aggravated, but his hand brushed Abigail’s hair back as he said it.  
  
“Abigail,” Leonie said, “Why don’t you go for a walk with your father?”  
  
She looked up at him.  
  
He processed her meaning immediately, and although he didn’t look pleased, he nodded curtly, gently placing his hand on Abigail’s back and guiding her out of the room.  
  
When Cabal was out of hearing range, Frank Barrow looked very old. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”  
  
Leonie almost told him that she hadn’t thought she would either, but thought better of it. “Why don’t you turn on the radio? I’m sure they’ll be talking about it.”  
  
Absently, Frank Barrow rose to his feet, knees popping as he rolled onto the soles of his shoes and settled into the standing position. There would be news about what happened. The Mr. Freedman at the local station would probably be talking about it nonstop and he wasn’t inclined to see the details of Leonie’s attack paraded over the air waves. He also wanted to know how much damage Cabal had done in the process of rescuing Abigail.  
  
He tuned out the advertisements and walked over to the window.  
  
In the courtyard of the hospital, nicely decorated with an array of flowers and shrubs, Cabal and Abigail were staring into a small coy pond. It was a calming, garden-like area meant as a reprieve from the monotony of the hospital for long-resident patients. Their backs were to the hospital proper, but Frank could tell what was happening.  
  
They stood side by side, frigid, similar and stoic, even though they were probably talking about something. The tension broke seconds later with Abigail wrapping her arms around Cabal’s waist, shoulders shaking soundlessly. He visibly stiffened and Frank got the distinct impression that he had absolutely no idea how to react to this. Lost for anything else, one hand rubbed back and forth over Abigail’s back while she cried.  
  
 _He was trying_. Frank Barrow hated that, because it made it impossible to write the villain off completely. He hated knowing good things about people he despised. He also knew that the man who had pointed a gun at him and cheated the devil was, in many respects, not the same man in the courtyard, and this was one thing he wasn’t likely to run from as much as it posed danger to him.  
  
The radio droned on.  
  
“…A night of horrors for Penslow upon Thurse. Following a home invasion and assault of a local woman, her seven-year-old daughter was kidnapped --- the child has since returned to the family. More shocking, the resident dead of the Brooksgate cemetery rose from their graves and walked the streets. Three grisly murders were reported on the outskirts of town, and the horde is considered by police to be highly suspect in the attack. However, before any of the undead could be questioned, they staggered back into town by dawn, frightened the local café owners by swarming them with requests for tea before politely returning to their graves and their eternal rest. --- Coming up, a common household product that can kill you…”


	12. Part XII – In Which Things are Very Awkward

Cabal did his best to avoid Leonie’s father in the weeks following the incident. Frank Barrow had decided to be difficult and made a point of coming around unannounced far more often than he had --- he had to return things to his daughter so often that Cabal theorized he actively took needless things from Leonie’s house just so he would have something to bring back at a randomized time of day. Cabal made a point of maintaining a presence when avoiding Barrow failed. They would eye each other from opposite corners of the room, waiting for the other to do something in plain view. Cabal wasn’t quite sure how much Abigail picked up on the tension, but she always groaned when her father and her grandpa were in the same room, which Leonie claimed was fairly telling.  
  
“Dad, when will you be back?” Abigail asked, voice clearly saying that she wished it wasn’t a long trip. Leonie went about making stew, pointedly absenting herself from the conversation. It was in English, out of the courtesy Cabal had developed towards her after seven years, but she knew that Cabal always said goodbye to Abigail with a modicum of privacy.  
  
This was the time when he still felt out of his element. “In a week, perhaps, assuming travel in France goes smoothly.” Meaning he remembered his French well enough to avoid arousing suspicion in the presence of the marquis; smooth travel, in this case, would mean not losing his head. Awkwardly, he shifted. “I’ll try to bring you something back.”  
  
That got a smile from her. He felt uncomfortable again, but was reasonably confident he’d made the right move.  
  
“You can’t stay for dinner?” Leonie said suddenly, and Cabal was startled out of his thoughts.  
  
He narrowed his eyes. Although the two of them had come to an ease around each other, it was still rare of her to ask him to stay when he needed to leave. He came and he went, that was the arrangement. “I should be going if I want to make it to London by morning.”  
  
“The train leaves at nine. You have time.” Leonie’s eyes flickered. “Besides, if it’s such a long trip, all the more reason to eat.”  
  
Confused as to what exactly was going on, he hardly noticed Abigail tugging on his sleeve. He made the mistake of looking at her face, and suddenly dinner at the house seemed like a perfectly reasonable, logical decision. He sighed. “Fine.”  
  
Abigail’s face lit up. She wanted him around for another hour and a half. If she could have, she would have extended it two hours at a time until he lived there. Again, he felt as though he’d made the right decision, even if he’d already said goodbye and didn’t look forward to it again so soon.  
  
That was when he heard a dreadful knock on the front door that Leonie immediately went to answer, flinging a dishtowel onto the counter and laying the spoon on the counter. Already, Cabal was beginning to feel more like a trapped animal. He was torn between fleeing, Abigail, and disbelief at Leonie as Detective Barrow’s voice resonated. Feeling much like a cobra surprised to see the mongoose waiting for him in his den, he was unsure what to do.  
  
Barrow stopped at the entrance to the kitchen, eyes finding Cabal as he froze.  
  
“What’s he doing here?”  
  
The stunned look on the other man’s face told him all he needed to know. “I was just leaving,” Cabal said quickly, anger at being made a fool of controlled, if obvious. As he turned to go, Abigail grasped his sleeve.  
  
“But Dad, you said you’d stay for dinner.”  
  
His gaze ripped from Abigail to Leonie and back, the cornered feeling returning. “So I did,” he ground out in reply, not taking his eyes off Barrow, who returned the favor.  
  
It looked like it was going to be a rather miserable hour and a half, and the only way out of it meant disappointing Abigail, which he tried to circumvent when it was avoidable.  
  
Barrow set the plates and Cabal moved to help Leonie take the food to the table so he could speak with her. Angrily, he took the warm loaf of bread off the counter. “You planned this. I don’t take well to being humiliated.”  
  
“Come off it,” Leonie hissed back, “there was tension and I went about breaking it, which was more than either of you were going to do.”  
  
“Myself and your father will never be on good terms.” He knew both because he had common sense and because he had once pointed a gun at Leonie. He knew what exactly he would do to anyone who threatened Abigail, and treating them to Sunday brunch wasn’t even a remote possibility; he doubted Barrow would be any more forgiving.  
  
“Maybe not,” Leonie replied, “but you _will_ be civil to each other while you are under my roof. Or you’ll kill each other and get it over with. Either way.”  
  
Cabal was beginning to sense that some of his ruthless pragmatism had rubbed off on Leonie. A part of him approved, but he decided that Leonie would need to be more subtle about it.  
  
Dinner began with both men trying to sit as far away from one another as possible, even to the point where they were subconsciously off-center from the table. Feeling silly, they corrected and resigned themselves to glaring at each other from across the mashed potatoes. They could at least agree that they were aggravated with Leonie for doing this to them. Leonie and Abigail went about dinner as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and Cabal wished she regretted her choice.  
  
“Dad,” Leonie began, “how did your poker tournament go?”  
  
“As well as could be expected,” Frank replied. “I would have won if the town butcher hadn’t pulled a royal flush at the last minute, the sod.”  
  
“I do hate it when that happens,” Cabal replied. Frank Barrow’s eyes narrowed in a way that said he took it as a threat.  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“I was just making conversation.”  
  
“I was talking to Leonie.”  
  
Cabal was starting to get miffed. “Were you now? Well, I know you were speaking to her, but this is a dinner table, not a sound-proofed room or a crowded building, both, ironically having more sense of personal space than a dinner party. One would think it a natural assumption that others would try to join the dialog, or do I just have it all wrong?”  
  
“I’m wondering if I should even dignify that with a response.”  
  
“You just did. Checkmate.”  
  
“My god, I had no idea this would be so childish. You’re both full-grown men. We’re all professionals, for heaven’s sake. Act like it.”  
  
Frank turned frantically to his daughter. “But he started it!”  
  
Leonie raised an eyebrow at her father, wondering if he knew whether or not he’d just proven her point.  
  
Abigail piped up. “The carnival’s in town, can I go?”  
  
There was a hiss of breath as every adult in the room was stunned into silence before a loud, chorused “NO!” bellowed through the dining room.  
  
A small, embarrassed silence followed at Abigail’s startled expression, suddenly sure that she’d done something wrong.  
  
“Sorry, sweetie,” Leonie disarmed calmly, smile wide. “We just…aren’t quite sure you’re old enough to go by yourself.” Having a child seemed to have been what made Leonie a more accomplished liar than she’d ever been before.  
  
“Carnivals are rotten,” Frank grumbled into his stew, “the whole damn lot of them.”  
  
Cabal decided to let Leonie handle it and addressed Barrow. “Well, I’m glad there’s something we can agree on.”  
  



	13. Part XIII – That Damn Cat

  
Cabal arrived late, stayed the night, and made the terrible oversight of not locking the door to the guestroom. Leonie came downstairs to see him forcefully making tea in the kitchen. There were scratches all over his face, his eyes were bloodshot, and his nose was running.  
  
“My god, what _happened_ to you?”  
  
“Your cat tried to smother me last night.”  
  
Leonie blinked. “Freud tried to smother you?”  
  
“I don’t care what its damn name is. It tried to kill me.”  
  
She raised an eyebrow, suddenly envisioning her cat holding a pillow over Cabal’s face and waiting for the twitches to stop. “You mean he tried to sleep on your head?” She shook her head. “He was just trying to be friendly. Besides, you left your door open.”  
  
He glared at her, and she could still see cat hairs clinging to his eyelids. He pointed to one of the many scratches on his face. “If _this_ is your definition of friendly, I’d be loath to know what your definition of hostility is.” His lip curled and he gestured at the rest of the house. “I have seen creatures from beyond dimensions, untold eons of chaos and corruption to their names, and monsters frozen in time nestled within uncharted mountains --- I have never known an animal of such elemental wickedness as your bloody cat.”  
  
“You’re rather melodramatic this early in the morning.”  
  
He glared at her, took a spiteful sip of his Ceylon blend, and stormed off into the living room to read an ancient tome retrieved from his Gladstone.


	14. Part XIV – Daniel

When Abigail was ten years old, Leonie found the man she wanted to marry.  
   
Daniel was a good man who worked with his hands. Tall and chestnut-haired, he was the carpenter that repaired her rocking chair, who was fascinated by what she did for a living without being disturbingly interested in the psychology of murder and crime. He was no great master of words, but he was kind and honest. They went out together, he met her father and the two men hit it off over alcohol and cigars. As these things usually happened, within about six months, he proposed to her and she accepted with a blush and a giddy giggle. It was a relationship and a world countless worlds away from what she’d had and continued to have with Cabal, and she was ecstatic about the freedom it posed. It was practically normal.  
   
For some reason, Daniel’s existence came as a complete surprise to Cabal; he disliked Daniel immediately for it. There were a handful of melancholic thoughts that followed preparations for the wedding. While Cabal and Leonie had both always understood that a further relationship would never work, there was a small part of him that wondered if it could have. The musings were natural and he had no intention of pursuing them. It wasn’t jealousy so much as the fact that Daniel represented his hatred of change; that aspect went unacknowledged.  
   
Cabal lurked around the house, grumbling as he watched Daniel working on a chair or a squealing cupboard. Daniel attempted to smile or make conversation, despite clearly having misgivings about Abigail’s father still frequenting the house so often. Cabal was barely polite, and even that depended on his mood.  
   
Mostly, Cabal moped.  
   
He had a place that he read when he visited Abigail, and he considered it one of his last places of refuge in the house. Although he never felt like he had any sort of a claim in Leonie’s house, years had carved out places that felt like his, that he felt comfortable in. In the living room he read on a chair and drank tea. He tried to spend as much of his time there with Abigail as he could, but while she was at school he became restless; he tried to make the best of it.  
   
He was just getting to chapter three when heavy work boots boomed through the hallway connecting the living room to the kitchen. Cabal glanced up from his book and pondered the probability of dodging.  
   
Daniel appeared before Cabal could choose.  
   
“Mr. Cabal, I don’t feel as though we’ve been properly introduced.”  
   
They had been introduced, several times, but Cabal had always pretended not to hear.  
   
He smiled a smile that had sent full-grown men into fits of tears and extended a gloved hand. “Johannes Cabal.”  
   
“It’s a pleasure,” Daniel said.  
   
Cabal pointedly ignored that and leaned back in the armchair, expecting not to go anywhere for a while. As soon as he did so, he realized the creak was gone and that Daniel had probably been the one to repair it. It fouled his mood even further.  
   
Daniel sat on the sofa, smile on his face wavering as he tried to find conversation with someone who seemed utterly unapproachable. “Leonie’s told me a lot about you.”  
   
Cabal’s attention snapped fully into place. “Did she now?”  
   
“Well,” Daniel seemed like he was trying to backtrack, “not a lot, per se… in fact, not much at all. Except that you’re…Abigail’s father. And that you can brood with the best of them.” He looked like he tried to laugh the last part off as a joke.  
   
“Good,” Cabal clipped. “A fact and her personal observation, I’d prefer we leave it at that.”  
   
“Mr. Cabal, we see each other so often but we talk rarely. I’d at least like to know what you do for a living. She said you are a…” he looked Cabal over, “carnival proprietor?”  
   
“That’s an untruth. I _was_ a carnival proprietor for one miserable year. I am a scientist by trade.”  
   
“Oh, political science?”  
   
The comment took Cabal aback. To his credit, he searched Daniel’s face for the joke. “No. Science-science. Those classes I’m guessing you skipped in secondary school.”  
   
“Oh!” Daniel said, and Cabal saw a brief snap of anger beneath that honest, boyish visage. “I’m sorry, Leonie said you had an interest in international politics.”  
   
“I don’t, sometimes they have an interest in me and I persuade them to other past times, but politics is something I personally loathe.”  
   
“My mistake…” there was a long, awkward pause in the conversation as he tried to find something that would get Cabal to speak further. Cabal, foolishly, attempted to try reading his book again.  
   
“What are you reading?”  
   
Cabal fought a fresh wave of irritation. He liked Daniel less by the minute. “What do you know of the Bloodswarm?”  
   
“I’ve never heard of it.”  
   
“Good. I hope you never have to fully comprehend what it is.”  
   
“A scientist, you say? Do you teach?”  
   
“Only with a gun to my head. I loathe the public school system and the ignorant pigeonholing of the universities.”  
   
Daniel shrugged. “I don’t think they’re too bad. We have some of the best schools in the world right now.”  
   
“Perhaps, but it’s still an exercise in the stifling of creativity and a waste of the best learning years of a child’s life. There’s a reason why Leonie and I have tried so hard to enrich Abigail’s education outside of school.” He shrugged. “And having the best schools in the world doesn’t mean much when other rising powers like the United States are beating each other silly over whether or not evolution should be included in the curriculum.”  
   
Daniel’s mouth twitched a little. “Isn’t that a matter of opinion?”  
   
Cabal stared at the other man, face utterly blank behind his spectacles. “I beg your pardon?”  
   
“It’s a matter of opinion. People are allowed to believe whatever they like.”  
   
“Evolution is not an opinion. It is fact, I assure you.”  
   
“But you choose to believe that it’s fact.”  
   
“Of course,” Cabal said, his tone adapting an edge, “people are allowed to believe that the sky is green if they live in a forest, that doesn’t mean they’re right or enlightened. Evolution is hardly an opinion —- it’s a fact like your vestigial tail.”  
   
“I’m not making a statement one way or another…but it _is_ your opinion.”  
   
“Those sort of catch-all responses are lazy and do little but disregard the importance of comments like the one I just made. It allows for society to wallow in ignorance.” Cabal’s blood pressure was rising dangerously at this point.  
   
“I like to think of it as ‘diversity’.”  
   
~~~  
   
Leonie came home early from the station to hear two rather aggravated men’s voices get louder. She stepped into the kitchen in time to hear a familiar Hessan-accented voice say, “By that logic gravity is an opinion too. Kindly do everyone a favor and test that hypothesis on the nearest cliff side!” and to watch Cabal storm angrily out of her living room.  
   
Her expression lapsed into horror as she realized what happened. “Oh dear…”  
   
Cabal stopped and scowled at her. “I’ve seen more intelligence from coin-operated sex-toys. You might as well be marrying one of those.”  
   
Leonie pressed a hand to her forehead. “What happened?”  
   
“In terms you will understand as a psychologist – Your fiancée is an enabler for stupidity in society at large. I consider the entire conflict ironic, given that he could just as easily be considered for the role of The Missing Link should they ever get around to making Darwinism on Ice.” Now that was a show he would spend his time to see. He tilted his neck, and a tendon popped. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go read to my daughter from the Origin of Species to wipe the taste of that conversation out of my mouth.”  
   
Daniel followed a couple seconds later, looking torn between anger and surprise. “What was that all about?”  
   
Leonie watched him go, and pressed a finger to her forehead. She replied, “I have two children and one isn’t taking the wedding well. That’s what.”


	15. Part XV.V - In Which Abigail Could be Anything

“Dad,” Abigail announced one day, “I think I want to be a doctor.”  
   
Cabal scowled on reflex, not sure he’d heard her correctly. “Doctors do very little to contribute yet boast of big accomplishments. Brothel girls are probably of better service to mankind – there are no false promises or mistakes in the services they provide.”  
   
Later, en route to his guest room, he was very confused to see Leonie exit Abigail’s room, scowling. She walked over and popped him on the shoulder. “What did you say to her?”  
   
He jerked at the motion, glaring at the finger she’d tapped his shoulder with. “Would you care to inform me-“  
   
“Abigail’s upset. She said she told you she wanted to be a doctor, and you said she’d be better off as a whore.” Scowling, she popped him in the shoulder again.  
   
“Stop that.” He brushed her hand away. “Those weren’t my exact words.”  
   
Leonie crossed her arms. “You will go in there and apologize to her this instant. You will tell her she can be anything she wants to be.”  
   
“Why should I preach a philosophy I don’t believe in? She’s ten. She shouldn’t be pigeonholing herself anyway.”  
   
“She’s ten!” Leonie exclaimed, “She’s allowed to have goals and fantasies without them being shot down and you will go in there and tell her that she can be anything she wants!”  
   
He raised an eyebrow. “Fine, if it’s that important to you.” He walked into Abigail’s room, leaving a confused Leonie to wonder why he’d given up so quickly.  
   
“Abigail?”  
   
She didn’t look up from her desk; it was one of the rare times she was cross with him, and it was uncomfortable for him. “I wanted to apologize for what happened earlier.” After a long silence, he managed, “You can even be a doctor, if that’s what you decide when the time comes,” between gritted teeth.  
   
She spun her chair around. “You mean it?”  
   
“Of course I do, you can be anything you want.”  
   
Leonie smiled from the doorway.  
   
Cabal clapped Abigail on the shoulder —- she was getting tall enough that he barely had to bend over any more. “Your potential is boundless and you can do anything. In fact,” he declared, “you can even do something illegal, as long as you don’t get caught.”  
   
Leonie popped him on the shoulder again as he left, as aggravating as the sting was (and he hoped Leonie didn’t make a habit out of it) the look on her face was satisfying enough to dull the pain.


	16. Part XV – Kiss the Girl

The wedding was in the summer. It was a moderate event, the small luxuries and extravagancies the couple permitted were done so either as wedding gifts from local artisans who knew them, or they were given a discount because of her father’s years of service. The sun was going down by the time the wedding party was in its crescendo, casting a peach-glow over the celebrations as candles and gaslights were lit. Local musicians composed the band, vocals and strings combined a nice blend folk music that matched the atmosphere of a pleasant summer night. Everything was warmth and kindness.  
   
Leonie looked truly, unbelievably happy. Daniel would say something, and she would arch her back in laugher before swaying into him for a slower number. In turn, Daniel would bend down and whisper something in her ear before placing a gentle kiss on her lips. Her dress was nontraditional, made of a fine cotton but stunningly embroidered —- it caught the eye but not to the point of being gaudy. Her arms were bare and she wore no veil. It was practical and down to Earth, just like her. It was a sort of radiant beauty that was all her own.  
   
Cabal watched from the edge of the attendance hall, hovering near the window to the deck if he needed to make an escape. He was partaking in a small amount of champagne, and found his mood in an unusually pleasant place. He was content enough that he could ignore that he didn’t like Daniel, or that there were plenty of whispers going around, more or less to the effect of “isn’t that the carnival man?”  
   
With the question, so were flying the rumors. Cabal and Leonie had decided not too long ago that they no longer cared. The wedding, when they were distracted with other things, seemed as good a time as any for him to make an appearance in public. Their instincts had been good, as almost everyone was too focused on the happy couple to think about anything else. Penslow was infuriatingly quaint like that.  
   
He neither partook in the activities nor made a point about being separate from them. He was simply there, enjoying a moment of unusual peace. Only one person endeavored to talk to him, an old priest who had spoken to him the first time he’d come to Penslow. Despite his general dislike for the clergy, this man had a welcoming air; it was hard not to feel somewhat comfortable with him. (“How’s Satanism working out for you?” “I’ve quit it. The benefits were appealing, but the retirement plan was unacceptable.” “That’s wonderful. As long as you’re happy. Are you looking for an alternative faith?” “I’ve been thinking of trying out Voodoo, further research is required before I pursue it, though.” “I wish you the best. Have some cake, it’s very good.”)  
   
When he stepped out onto the deck to get some fresh air, still nursing a glass of champagne, Leonie came out to see him. She approached to his right, stepping up to the railing and staring at the sky above.  
   
“I was married once,” he said, voice quiet.  
   
Leonie started, unsure about what to say. Instead, she just sighed, and placed a hand on his. “It seems as though we’ve known each other so long, been through so much.” So long since the time she first saw him on the street talking to her father, so long since she’d received the contract she’d signed away her soul on, and many, many years since they’d reached for each other during and after the wreck of the _Hortense_. “I still know so little about you.”  
   
He faced her, unsure how to respond.  
   
“It’s okay,” Leonie replied, smirking as though gently teasing. “I’m not sure I want to know.” They were quiet for a time, standing side-by-side comfortably. “Cabal…I still don’t know what you’re looking for…but for what it’s worth I do hope you find it someday.” She hoped he didn’t lose too much of himself in the process or hurt too many other people.  
   
She knew that, when he left her home, he went out into the world and acted either the part of the monster or the hero. It was impossible to know which man stepped out her door, and in some sense she felt responsible for the good and bad things he’d done. The only thing she was ever sure about was that when he entered her home he was a parent, a role she never thought he’d fill.  
   
They were beyond his wickedness, now, for it was what it was, but it still hung like a shroud between them. He was a comet, and he walked a razor’s edge between her orbit and something else, something dark and cold beyond her imagining. Someday, he would probably collide with something, or that world would come crashing into hers like it had three years ago. Leonie liked to think she’d come to terms with that risk, even though she still didn’t know why she bothered.  
   
“Thank you, Leonie,” he hid the shake in his voice. Her wedding reminded him that it had been almost two decades since his own, and the time that hung between him and his own goal suddenly seemed like a vast chasm. He knew his own age was showing in the flecks of grey in his hair, the tiredness in his eyes after every failure, every nightmare faced. His time was growing short, and he didn’t like it.  
   
He glanced up to the small shape hiding poorly in the curtains of the French doors. “My dear, Leonie, it seems as though we’re being spied on.”  
   
The shape stiffened, but didn’t flee.  
   
“Abigail,” Leonie called out, “come out, say hi.”  
   
The shape hesitated. Seconds later, their daughter came shuffling out onto the deck. Leonie wrapped her in a giant hug before squealing about how pretty she looked in her dress. “Are you enjoying the party?”  
   
“The cake’s good.”  
   
Leonie grinned and kissed her forehead. “I must meet more of my audience.” She paused as she turned to leave, as though she wanted to say something else, but carried on. “Thank you for coming.”  
   
He smiled and inclined his head before turning his attention to Abigail; they spoke in low, personal German. “So tell me the truth, do you really like Daniel?” He hadn’t had a chance to really ask her without Leonie hovering nearby.  
   
“He’s all right, I guess.” Abigail sighed. “He’s really nice and mom’s always really happy with him…” But she also knew, instinctively, that she had nothing in common with him. He liked sports more than books and didn’t understand why she would choose to stay inside and read over playing outside.  
   
Cabal’s mouth twitched. It summed Daniel up. “He bores me,” he admitted. “I don’t plan on ever understanding what your mother was thinking.” He thought about his words and amended, “however, he’s your step-father, so you should respect him…or whatever it is.”  
   
Sensing his lack of enthusiasm, she leaned against the railing, arms folded as she rested her chin on them and looked down to the city.  
   
“Dad? What was she like?”  
   
“Who?”  
   
“Your wife. You said you were married.”  
   
“…Perhaps I’ll tell you one day. Not tonight.”  
   
“Oh, okay.”  
   
“After all, I’d still like for you to meet her.”  
   
Abigail thought that was an odd thing to say, but her father was odd sometimes so she didn’t ask anything further.


	17. Part XVI – In which life goes on

Frank Barrow didn’t live to see his second grandchild born. It happened while Cabal was away, although he’d known Frank to be ill when he left; he visited him in the hospital after his heart attack, and hoped he would be fine even as he kept cynical distance from the situation.  
   
“If I didn’t know any better,” Frank rasped from aged lips, “I’d have thought you poisoned me.”  
   
“What makes you think I didn’t?” Cabal had replied. “One of your _feelings_?”  
   
“No,” Frank replied, and Cabal tried to pretend he didn’t see the haze in those old eyes. “You have nothing to gain from it. Besides, I think you knew this was coming anyway.”  
   
Cabal had to ask something. “Do you still think of death as a release now that you’re faced with it?” His voice was neither gloating nor bitter, merely academic.  
   
Frank was silent for a long time. “Maybe, maybe not. There’s nothing I can do about it now.” His eyes then hardened, and Cabal saw the man who had defied him so long ago. “Don’t you try your craft on me. When I rest, let me rest.”  
   
“And rest at ease, Detective Barrow,” Cabal had said, half-sneering, “with the knowledge that I do not have the power to help you, even if I wanted to.”  
   
It was the last exchange they had.  
   
The loss didn’t bother him deeply. A part of him wished things had been different, that they could have gotten along better, but anything that could have been wasn’t, and anything that could be never would.  
   
The change brought about in Leonie by her father’s death affected him far more.  
   
Cabal had never seen Leonie so miserable, swollen with her second child and stunned that her father was no longer with them. Leonie’s distance from life in the month or so following Detective Barrow’s passing was uncertain and uncomfortable for Cabal. He knew she was lonely. Her father had always been there for her, and Cabal could practically see the gap in her life. She was a strong person and he knew that it would fill in time, even if the hole was covered by little more than plaster and a fresh paint job, always painful and near the surface.  
   
All the raw grief made his skin itch. Comforting Abigail was far easier, they communicated without words often, and he could convey his sympathy when words failed him. Leonie was a mystery, full of sadness that he felt far removed from.  
   
One lonely night when the rest of the household had gone to sleep, she found him reading, long-smothered tears hanging from her chin.  
  
“There’s nothing you can do?” She wiped the side of her face with a palm, but her voice was hard. It was determination, hope, rising out of the ashes of sorrow and misery. He knew she would not follow up, that she couldn’t dedicate herself to it as he had, but he heard the edge of steel in those words that reverberated with a young man who had lost his wife in the spring over two decades hence. “Surely there must be something a necromancer can do for him.”  
   
“No,” he answered simply, then his face softened, and he added, “but for you, I would bring him back if it was within my power…I’m sorry for your loss.”


	18. Part XVII – In which Things Come to Pass and Debts are called

The night Abigail turned thirteen Cabal received a late night call from Leonie. It wasn’t through the typical channels – it was a system that he had arranged for emergencies like the Basilisk attack. It was one shot, one conversation, and Leonie never would have used it for anything other than something truly dire. He picked up the black marble, hand betraying the earliest traces of arthritis as he lifted it to his ear.  
   
“What’s wrong?”  
   
“Johannes, you have to come here. Now.”  
   
“What happened?”  
   
“The cat’s running around the house.”  
   
He paused, frowning away the sleep. “What’s so unusual about that?”  
   
“Freud died three days ago.”  
   
His mouth hung open in dull shock as he tried to process that. “I’ll be there right away.” The phone clacked back to its carriage. He grabbed his Gladstone bag, coat, and hat off of the rack as he left his home.  
   
Their emergency response system was months in the planning. A series of one-way gates and ley lines allowed him to make a trip that normally took days in about two hours. The series of jumps left him dizzy, constant de-materializing and re-materializing leaving his nerves shaky and his skin tingling. He took advantage of the rest periods in between jumps to load and check his revolver. The severity of the situation was offset by the fact that he was finally going to be able to pay Leonie’s cat back for every scrape, scratch, scar, and bite that marked his skin.  
   
He stepped out of the last jump already in full stride up Leonie’s driveway. The sky was clouded with the beginnings of a storm, and rising breeze caught his frock and blew it around. One hand went to his hat to keep it from flying off.  
   
When he entered the house, he found a scene of restrained panic, a family simultaneously pulled together by adverse circumstances and fraying at the edges. Daniel was looming in the back of the room, arms crossed and looking every bit the part of the disapproving Neanderthal. Cabal disregarded him almost immediately. Leonie was pacing frantically, her young son clinging to her neck and sobbing, adding the unnecessary panic in the air. Abigail sat on the couch, staring straight ahead with her hands clasped in front of her; Cabal knew her well enough to know she was horrified, to see the shakes and shudders and wanted nothing more than to _crush_ whatever was hurting her.  
   
Everyone glared at him when he walked in.  
   
Leonie’s eyes locked on him with an expression of such fierce loathing that had not been turned in his direction for many years. She placed her son in his playcrib and turned to Cabal. “You utter bastard.” She swallowed, and he could see she’d been crying. “I trusted you. I let you into my _home_. For years, and this is what you were up to all along. I don’t know what you think you have to gain from this, you _sick_ —-“  
   
“Will you calm down and be rational, please?” he pulled off his gloves. “I don’t have time for false accusations, especially when I have not a clue of what I’m being accused of.”  
   
That was when he noticed the cat lounging on the arm of the chair. Chunks of fur and flesh clung to a body that was pockmarked and broken. Its eyes were huge, milky saucers from which all color had drained and pus dripped.  
   
His hatred for the thing plummeted in correlation with his rise in interest.  
   
Then came the dread.  
   
He looked from the cat, and back to his daughter, so mortified she’d barely noticed his entrance, and back at the look of anger, the betrayal Leonie radi.  
   
“Leonie, the situation is not what it appears to be,” he replied. “What you’re implying is simply impossible.”  
   
“All right then, if you aren’t somehow behind this, then tell me what happened,” Leonie said, voice shaking, “she is your daughter. What if it’s genetic?”  
   
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped; he’d never planned for this, not in his wildest dreams, and Leonie’s nervousness infectious. “People aren’t born to my lifestyle. It’s something you become. Saying it’s because she’s my daughter is like saying a child could be born with red hair if one parent dyed their hair. It simply doesn’t work that way.”  
   
“What about just being exposed to you during her development? What if it just… _changed_ her?”  
   
“I’ve never heard of that happening. Granted, Rufus Maleficarus and his father both had similar tendencies with regards to the occult. That had more to do with insanity and egomania running in the family, not magic.”  
   
Her voice dropped low and dangerous, accusing again, “Then _how_ did this happen?”  
   
“I…” he paused, collected his thoughts. “We’re not even sure anything happened.”  
   
Abigail made a tiny noise, a little croak as the tears broke free again. “I just wanted Freud back so badly.” She pulled her knees in tightly, hugging them to her chest and trying to sink into the cushions. “And then he did.”  
   
Leonie put her fingers to her temple. “Do you need any more proof than that?”  
   
“That’s hardly proof. That’s circumstantial at best.” This was starting to annoy him.  
   
There was another tiny noise. “I made it happen,” her voice came out in a whisper, “I reached out and touched him and he reached back. Dad…I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again, I _swear_ —-”  
   
“She’d better not,” Daniel spoke for the first time, a hard, angry line to his voice. “Leonie, she was doing _necromancy_.”  
   
“I didn’t know!” Abigail sputtered.  
   
“Things like that don’t just happen!”  
   
Cabal had just about had it with Daniel. “Unless you happen to be an authority on the subject, kindly shut up and let me think, you jabbering dolt.”  
   
“How dare you speak to me that way —-“  
   
“I could not care less about you right now,” Cabal took a seat next to Abigail, and she flinched. He was many things, but he’d always tried not to be the kind of parent that would make his daughter flinch. “Abigail, you need to tell me exactly what happened.”  
   
She shook her head. The cat spat and hissed at the doorway. Over the sound of pouring rain, Cabal heard the steady thump of a wooden stick, with feet shuffling on the wet gravel. His lips curled into something between a sneer and a snarl, rage. He should have known. From day one, he should have seen this coming.  
   
The avatar of the Devil in the form of the little old man had flair for the dramatic.  
   
The door swung open, slamming against the wall as lightning struck and rain dripped down his long coats and staff. It pooled around his feet as he stepped through the doorway, a crooked smile plastered on his face.  
   
“Satan,” Cabal said cordially.  
   
“It’s been far too long, Herr Cabal.”  
   
“On the contrary, I was going to say it hadn’t been long enough. I was planning on seeing you again…well, never.”  
   
The old man cackled. “You thought you could _hide_ her from me? You thought you could hide your _bastard spawn_ from me? _Me?!_ The source of all human sin?”  
   
There was no chance Satan was unaware of Abigail’s existence. However, the years hand lulled him into a sense of security regarding Lucifer. He’d seen things that made his experience with the fallen angel seem like a friendly game of strip chess in comparison. There was a part of him that had stupidly assumed that he was the victor in their battle of wits and that Satan would shuffle off back to hell like a good sport, saying ‘better luck next time’.  
   
“I never thought I could hide her from you. That would be stupid.”  
   
“I’ll only give you one warning,” Cabal hissed. “Leave her out of this. If you have some sort of a score to settle to make yourself feel like the bigger man compared to the little mortal, then we can arrange something. I assure you, you have nothing to gain from harassing her.”  
   
The old man cackled. “Harassing? Is that what I’m doing, Johannes Cabal? I’ve done nothing malicious to her, nothing at all. I’ve merely given her a gift.” His eyes flashed, nearly _red_ and cruel. “A birthday present. The same gift you once sold your soul for.”  
   
“Those witless brainwashed witches with the Basilisk.” The pieces were falling into place. “You somehow used them to set the seed, a time bomb that would surely have emerged on her thirteenth birthday. The resurrection of a house cat was probably not what you had in mind. My guess is that you expected her to be celebrating in town and that she would uncontrollably raise the dead in the local cemetery, devastating the whole area when it manifested.”  
   
“Astute, but alas, I’ve learned not to hope for such rampant destruction out of one measly gift.”  
   
Cabal was quiet as Leonie stepped between them. “Then she just won’t use it.”  
   
He laughed again, and Cabal shifted. “It’s not as simple as that. The Deep Knowledge is…dangerous in the wrong hands. Not every mind is meant to handle it. Uncontrolled, it will attract certain demons and avatars, each promising more power than the last. Ignoring it without understanding will surely lead to madness.”  
   
“Ask yourself, can a child really stand up to that sort of temptation?” The old man inclined his head. “A power and the discipline not to use it? It will dog her every hour of every day and you know she’s powerless to it.”  
   
“Take it away.” Leonie was now standing fully between Cabal and the avatar of Satan. “Take it away from my daughter this instant.”  
   
“I will take it away for a price.”  
   
“Don’t listen to him, Leonie. He lives for deception.”  
   
“What price?”  
   
“I want the soul I was cheated out of so long ago. Ms. Barrow, all you have to do is sign away yourself to me and your daughter will be free of the Deep Knowledge of Necromancy.”  
   
“No,” Cabal growled. “Don’t do it, Leonie. If not this, then he’ll do something else. He knows who Abigail is. He’ll never leave her alone, the only difference is that you will have let him win.”  
   
“What is it, woman?” The old man inclined his head. “Make your choice.”  
   
Leonie stood up tall. “Leave my home.”  
   
“I don’t think you heard me,” Satan sneered. “Your daughter. Limitless power. Madness. Demons. I’m sure you understood every word of Cabal’s spiel.”  
   
“I’m not going to be forced into my choice by an ugly, petty little man badgering me in my own home. You are trespassing and I would like you to leave.”  
   
“Or what? What could _you_ do to _me_?  
   
That was when Leonie pulled out an old revolver and shot him twice in the chest, staggering Satan with the force of the impact. The boom filled her tiny house, rattling their ribcages and masking the wet sound of bullets thumping into flesh. She shot once more, catching the old man on his downward staggar. “I’ll return!” he roared. “And you had decide before I take the offer off the table!”  
   
His ragged coats and clothes caught and spiraled upwards, swirling up into the sky with a demonic howl.  
   
The door thudded emptily against the wall, sadly shutting and opening in the wind. The youngest child was crying again, while Abigail said nothing, and Daniel seemed to have gone completely quiet. He had the pallid appearance of a man who had checked out mentally. Cabal cleaned his spectacles, “Excellent shots, by the way.”  
   
Shivering, Leonie put the gun down on the table, staring at the open door. “He’ll never leave her alone, will he? Even if I sell my soul away…”  
   
“No,” Cabal answered. “He won’t.”  
   
“…What other choice do we have?”  
   
Daniel spoke up. “The asylum. She can go to the asylum.”  
   
Leonie looked horrified at her husband’s words. “You can’t be serious. I’m not sending my daughter to an insane asylum.”  
   
“I tried to be understanding,” Daniel was stepping towards her. “I knew he was up to something bad, but I trusted your judgment.” He raised his hands. “I draw the line at sins against god and nature. It’s sad, but we have to do what’s best for us, for Teagan.”  
   
Leonie looked horrified and angry. “You’re asking me to choose between my two children?”  
   
He let his arms drop to his sides. “No, Leonie, I’m not. But Abigail is sick. In an asylum, she’ll be protected from herself.”  
   
“You mean other people will be protected from her,” Cabal intercepted. “You’re afraid, so you assume she’ll use the power to summon an army of the dead the next time a girl at school tells her she’s unattractive. This goes beyond god and nature, you just don’t trust her. You are pathetic in every way.” He faced Daniel when he walked towards him, stopping a punch’s length away. “I, however, am not afraid of her. And although Leonie clearly did not marry you for your brains, I’m sure you know what I am by now.”  
   
Daniel’s fist clenched and unclenched. Cabal almost wanted him to throw that punch, wanted an excuse to kill him for the things he’d just said.  
   
“Both of you stop!” Leonie snapped. “This isn’t helping anything.” She ran a hand over her face. “Johannes…is there anything you can do to help her?”  
   
He turned away from Daniel. “I do not have the power to take away what Satan gave her, and ignoring it will only cause greater trouble. She’ll be driven mad by nightmares and demons without proper understanding of what it is and how to use it. I can’t take it away, but I can give her mastery of the art.”  
   
“No,” Daniel crossed his arms. “I won’t have anyone practicing necromancy in this house.”  
   
“I wasn’t suggesting that,” Cabal added. “This would be an impractical setting. I’m suggesting that she come to live with me, and there, in a safe setting, I will educate her.”  
   
“I like how everyone is giving me a choice in this…” Abigail croaked from her spot on the couch. Tears were streaming down her face as she looked up at her father. “You’re a necromancer?”  
   
“I am.”  
   
“You’re a criminal,” she spat out.  
   
He flinched, stung and unwilling to admit it. “I believe in a cause greater than human law, and have on occasion shirked those parameters.”  
   
She was shaking, “I wanted to be like you so badly.”  
   
He had his good qualities; still, being like him wasn’t something he wished on anybody. “I’m sorry for disappointing you, Abigail.” She was, perhaps, one of the few people on Earth he could willingly apologize to, and he meant the words. She took them as dismissive or condescending – he wasn’t sure which. Hurt, she turned and ran to her room.  
   
~~~  
   
Leonie was shuddering in the aftermath. She sat on the couch while Daniel comforted their son. Hesitating, Cabal sat next to her.  
   
Leonie barely registered his presence. “If I thought there was even a chance that he would let her be, I’d do it. I’d sign that contract in a flash.”  
   
“I told you,” Cabal said, “that the fact she is my daughter would make her a target.”  
   
“I knew,” Leonie replied, “but she’s ours. A few nasties here and there can’t change that. You didn’t do this and I know it’s meant a lot to her to have you here.”  
   
“It doesn’t seem like it now.” Cabal seemed frustrated. “I’ve always gotten along with her well. As you know, that’s rare for me. Now she’s coming to live in my home and she’s furious.”  
   
“It’s a big change,” Leonie admitted. “She’s being pulled away from her home, her school, and her friends, all to practice a black art and keep demons from whittling away at her mind. Give her time.” She ran a hand through her hair, and for the first time he noticed that she had gray strands, too. “It’s a lot for a mother to handle.”  
   
“I never wanted this. Necromancy, were it not strictly necessary to my work, is not something I would have chosen.” The fact that his child now possessed the same Knowledge seemed like the punch line at the end of a life composed of many cruel ironies.  
   
“I believe you,” Leonie replied, then her eyes widened. “Oh, God. My little girl has to go away…I don’t know how I’m going to handle not having her in the house, not knowing where she is.”  
   
“It won’t be forever, just until she masters it. Then she can choose what she wants to do with it.”  
   
“You mean put it down forever and never use it again.”  
   
“I mean it will be her choice.”  
   
She scowled in disapproval. “We’ll worry about that when the time comes.”  
   
“Indeed,” Cabal replied, a long moment passed before he asked, “So…I did not know you had a gun in this house.”  
   
“I got it just before Abigail was born. I wanted to be able to protect myself and her.” She waved her hands in exasperation. “Fat lot of good it did me when the lizard knocked down our door.”  
   
His eyes narrowed. Although some things had dulled with age, his mind was still as sharp as it ever was. “You got the gun to protect yourself and Abigail…from me.”  
   
The silence that followed said everything.  
   
“I see.”  
   
“The thought crossed my mind. Johannes, you have to understand that it stopped being like that.”  
   
“Until tonight?” He queried. “My guess is that you’ve had it in a lock box for many years, probably upstairs. Tonight you were carrying it on you.”  
   
“I wasn’t sure what was happening.” Something disturbed him about how hard her eyes had become. “And yes, I would kill you to protect my child, just as I’m sure you would do the same to me. We’d probably lose something of ourselves if it ended that way, but that’s what we do. I know you’re probably disappointed in me. Until tonight I never had the faintest thought that you might hurt her, if it means anything.”  
   
Cabal smirked. “I’m not disappointed. I’m not even angry. If I were in your position, I would have done the same.” There was a time when his temper was practically legendary – it still had a short leash – but he no longer had the energy to be angry at Leonie. “I’ve known you for fifteen years and I am a quick learner. You happen to be a deeply stubborn woman that would make even the angriest, oldest _haus frau_ think twice about confronting you. I no longer have the time to argue with you over things that have already happened.”  
   
Leonie slowly looked sideways, utterly puzzled. “Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking in Senza. Mythical status aside, you’re still an utter bastard.”  
   
On that note, they sat, Daniel paced behind them, and the door banged thoughtlessly. It felt like they were both sitting in the rubble of the lives they’d had before. They’d seen the collision coming even if they’d never wanted to admit it, and all things considered, they had all been very lucky. Things would change. They were lucky because they had come out of it alive – the bodies of those they loved were not strewn about on the floor. They would do what they always did, sift through the rubble for the useful things and move on. The situation demanded perseverance; both of them were good at that. Others called it mule-headedness.  
   
The zombie cat hissed and yowled, darting out the door after some phantom rodent —- probably reminiscent of the muscular habits and memories from a life of instinct.  
   
“Now, if you’ll excuse me…” Cabal rose, grabbed a pan from the kitchen, and marched out the door to go deal with it, jaw grimly set.


	19. Part XVIII – In Which Abigail Studies Necromancy

The first couple weeks she lived with him, she was frightfully cold.  
   
There was a hard set to her jaw. She observed his house and its many oddities with a cursory, uninterested glance, as if ignoring it would make it all go away. She didn’t want to be there; she wanted to be back in Penslow, where familiar things were. Knowing her father wouldn’t tolerate direct obstinacy, she just stayed quiet.  
   
She was mad at her mother for sending her away; she was sickened and betrayed by Daniel, who had wanted nothing more than to shove her off on someone in a white lab coat when she was scared and confused. Mostly, she was mad at her father; not for being a necromancer, she realized, but for never telling her she worshipped a villain.  
   
The first day he seemed more nervous than she had ever seen him, taking note of a dozen tics he’d never had before.  She kept her arms folded, eyes focused on the ground as he led her to the rooms on the third floor.  
   
“You can choose whichever room you like.”  
   
Abigail looked at the doors, glanced inside the first couple before settling on one cattycornered to the master bedroom with a nice view down the valley.  
   
Cabal’s heart froze when she stepped through the door, his voice catching in his throat before he could stop her. She was already leaning against the bed, staring down the hillside, seeing some sort of beauty there he’d never seen nor bothered to look for.  
   
“Can I have this one?” she asked in German. Any protest he might have had died with that tiny smile, the hint that she could be happy in his wretched home.  
   
“Yes, you may,” he managed.  
   
She frowned at the sound of his voice and the look on her face. “Is something wrong?”  
   
“Nothing,” he gave a weak smile. “It’s just that this room belonged to my brother.”  
   
She frowned and faced the window again, her back to him. “I have an uncle?”  
   
“…No,” he said, voice cooling instantly. Sighing, he added, “He died a very long time ago.” The silence stretched onwards, and he figured that she either thought it was too impolite to ask or she didn’t wish to know. “Please, use the time before dinner to unpack. I’ll give you a few days to get settled before we begin work.”  
   
~~~  
   
While he allowed Abigail to get used to her new home, Cabal hastily made preparations with the local school to include her on the student list for the next semester. For Cabal, preparations included a late-night visit to the principal, a hefty cash bribe for one Abigail Barrow to be added, and a specific promise that the girl’s residence be treated with the utmost secrecy. The man obeyed as much out of fear as greed and assured Cabal that his requests could easily be met.  
   
To his benefit, the man put a significant amount of the money towards the art program.  
   
Cabal returned to his home. He was removing his coat when he noticed Abigail was sitting in the middle of his living room, the fireplace and the lamp the only light on in the house. The old crow was sitting on the chair next to her, occasionally munching on the bits of raw chicken she’d found for it. “Where were you?”  
   
“Just a quick visit downtown,” he assured her. “I enrolled you at the local school.”  
   
Abigail placed the marker in her book. “When do I start?”  
   
“After Christmas.” He faced downwards. “Abigail, what I’m about to tell you is very important – you cannot tell anyone that you’re my daughter. If it’s avoidable, don’t even tell them that you live here. I’m not ashamed of you, but it could be very dangerous for you if they know you live with me.”  
   
“It’s the same reason I couldn’t tell anyone you were my dad for years, isn’t it? It’s the necromancer thing.”  
   
“Yes.”  
   
He saw a certain panicked look come and go, only to be replaced by wide eyes and flat lips. Disappointment. In him. It would have been so much easier if she just came out and raged against him, threw things and howled and generally acted like a brat. Then he could maybe justify snapping back, pulling her out of it in order to focus on what needed to be done. Normally, he didn’t mind unleashing his notoriously short temper. Abigail was withdrawing, though, and he feared pushing her farther away from him. He kept looking for some way to reach her, but she allowed no opening.  
   
Cabal was beginning to believe he’d not so much cultivated a good relationship with Abigail as taught her how best to avoid conflict with him. It felt isolating; he didn’t like it.  
   
One day, about a week into her forced withdrawal, he handed her a handful of cash.  
   
She looked at the money, then back at him. For the first time, her expression had changed into one of surprise instead of detachment or depression.  
   
“It’s four miles into town,” he offered by way of explanation, “I think you should go to the shop in town and select a bicycle to make the trip to school easier. It should be rugged enough to handle the trail, and I recommend more than one gear to make the uphill climb easier. Other than that, I’m leaving the color and brand completely up to you. This is your budget. If you manage to find an appropriate bike for a lesser price, you may keep the remainder and spend it on whatever you wish. Is that all very clear?”  
   
She nodded an affirmative.  
   
“Good,” he offered something taxonomically related to a broad grin, “have fun.”  
   
Casting one glance over her shoulder as she left, as if wondering what he was planning but unable to piece together a complete picture, she started on the long road down to the small village nestled in between the hills.  
   
~~~  
   
It was late in the evening by the time she returned. He hadn’t told her to come back at any particular time; Abigail assumed that as long as she returned before dinner, she was safe. She’d located a bike she liked, and had had enough money left over for two books, a trip to the theatre, and a little to save for snacks or trinkets. It felt good to be out in the town and around people – they didn’t seem so horrible; the way her father talked, it was like each and every one of them was a lynch-mob waiting to happen.  
   
They were not too different from the people who lived in her home town. They were on the cusp of the holidays, so the shopkeepers on the main street were revitalizing their welcoming smiles. In fact, everyone was getting ready to be extra nice to others, as if the baby Jesus was watching them more closely at this time of the year than any other, and it might be a good idea to adhere to His teachings.  
   
Abigail frowned. Not that it was the baby Jesus who had done the teaching, so much as the adult Jesus. Maybe it was something other than the threat of divine wrath that inspired people to be nicer.  
   
The colors and lights of the town did her some good; perhaps it would not be so bad living there with her father as long as no one knew who she was.  
   
She left her bike on the gate outside. Still unsure how to deal with the horrid little sounds coming from his garden, she paused and called out.  
   
“It’s all right!” He yelled back from inside. “They know I’ll kill them if they so much as scratch you.”  
   
Abigail rolled her bike to a stop, leaning it against the coat rack on the entryway and shutting the door behind her. “Dad?” she asked when she didn’t see him in either the living room or the kitchen. “Where are you?”  
   
“Come down to the cellar,” he replied, “there’s something I want to show you.”  
   
She stopped at the door that had been locked until then, staring down into the darkness. “Dad?”  
   
“Grab the light and bring it down here.”  
   
Grabbing the gaslight hooked outside, she slowly traversed the staircase until she came to a room lit with bright, bluish lights and lined with tile. It was frightfully sterile, with jars of all different kinds lining the shelves, a cruel metal examination table, and a hose dangling from the ceiling, meant to wash the slanted floor through the drains near the basin of the dip.  
   
A series of tubes and candles lined the floor, each fluorescing with brilliant light, each in colors that she had no idea gaslight could exist in. They were drawn in an elaborate pentagram on the floor. Her father kneeled at its center, over a jar filled with dead and rotting flowers. “Abigail,” he nodded and motioned with one hand. “Have a seat.”  
   
Stunned, she sank to the floor just outside the circle, marveling at the colors more than anything else. “Is this my first lesson?” she hoped not, because she wasn’t sure she wanted necromancy to be so _pretty_.  
   
“Of a sort,” Cabal allowed. He motioned to the markings and strange devices around him. “Daniel will tell you that necromancy is a sin against god. Your mother will tell you that it is the pastime of society’s deranged and heartbroken, dangerous and harmful. The maniac who wishes to raise an army of the undead will tell you that it is the greatest source of raw power in human hands, since there will never, ever be a shortage of death. None of them are right, and none of them are inherently wrong. Necromancy is a tool, Abigail, nothing more, nothing less. It is no better or worse than the person who wields it and their reasons for taking up the art.”  
   
He turned his attention to the roses in front of him, black and sunken with death. His knife was produced, and he flicked it over the tip of his thumb, drawing the smallest drop of blood into the innermost circle, hissing a series of ancient words.  
   
Life returned to the bouquet – petals that had been dry and dead filled and became brilliant once more, while withering stems filled and grew strong. They sat in the vase as though freshly picked.  
   
Abigail watched in astonishment as the sweetest smell filled a room that otherwise smelled of preservatives and (faintly) stomach acid. She was barely focused on that, instead mesmerized by the rapid recovery of the flowers. He’d _healed_ them, he’d made them _better_. It wasn’t the ambling monstrosities the theatres and the warning seminars at school depicted; it was like watching a power of creation instead of one of destruction. She was awed out of her anger.  
  
Cabal stood, dabbing his bleeding thumb with his handkerchief as his knees cracked. He’d been sitting for quite a while. “Your mother will tell you that you are cursed. Satan did give you a gift – he gave you a tool. I will teach you how to use it, and from there you may make your own choices. Just know that it’s something beyond dogma and the propaganda you’ve been fed all your life.” He faltered and scowled. “I have no delusions about the life I’ve led. It is dangerous. I have been hated and feared, people have wanted me dead, and sometimes I have had to do horrible things to survive. In addition to the art of necromancy, I will teach you how best to avoid getting caught while practicing it.” He stepped over the circle, now spent and useless. “I suppose I should have a disclaimer. Those flowers will wilt in a day instead of a week, no matter how much water we give them. But do you understand now? Although the wilds may be dangerous, even flowers grow there.”  
   
“I understand.” Abigail rose to her feet and met her father’s eyes. “And I’ll learn.”  
   
She wanted to learn because she’d seen something miraculous, because in the moment she’d seen those wilted flowers return, she’d seen her future flash before her eyes. She saw herself studying some science or another at the university, marrying some well-adjusted man like her mother did, having three bouncing healthy children that she would see grow up and have children of their own. She would die at a ripe old age, beloved matriarch of her clan. Abigail could have sworn she lived an entire lifespan in those moments.  
   
It was so bloody _boring_.  
   
Abigail didn’t pretend she knew what necromancy would hold for her – it was a mystery, indecipherable until she discovered it for herself. As long as it wasn’t the simple life with the three bouncing babies, she was far more interested in it.


	20. Part XIX – the Christmas of Abigail’s 16th Birthday

Police Sergeant Parkin was making his yearly trip up to the old Victorian estate that loomed over his innocent town like Frankenstein’s castle. He was bundled up against the cold, and he was armored with iron-spiked boots to deal with Cabal’s garden in case the wicked little folk decided to give him trouble; he didn’t much like dealing with the occult, but a squished faery here or a Christmas drink with a man of ill repute seemed like a fair price for keeping the peace.  
  
His Christmas bribe also felt like a fair price for keeping the peace.  
   
He strode into the garden, whistling against the bitter winter chill, shuffling off the cold as he danced in place near the doorstep, keeping an eye-out for any attempts to devour him limb from limb or pluck out his eyes.  
   
He wasn’t expecting a lovely young girl to open the door.  
   
She had long, pale hair that waved ever so slightly and hung loose over a gray winter sweater.  
   
“Young miss,” he exclaimed, fingering his had in surprise, “you’re a girl from town. I’ve seen you down at the secondary school. What are you doing up here?”  
   
“Parkin!” Cabal materialized from around the corner of the entryway. “It’s perfectly all right, Abigail, I know him. Why don’t you step in from the cold, Sergeant? Show him to the living room while I get the tea. It wouldn’t do to have my peacemaker freezing.”  
   
Abigail motioned for the confused sergeant to follow her.  
   
“Excuse me, miss, but I can’t help but feel I’ve missed a doozy. Care to explain?”  
   
“Not particularly,” Abigail replied, grinning.  
   
“I’ve never seen you here before.”  
   
“That’s because you only come here on Christmas, and I usually spend Christmas with my mother’s family.” The only reason she was celebrating there that year was that they had only just returned from her first expedition to the sunken city of R’lyeh. This time of year it was normally undersea and on a distant star, but an odd celestial occurrence had caused the stars to be right in December instead of March (it would forever color the meaning of the term ‘Christmas star’ to her). Her father had thought it important to utilize the opportunity as part of her schooling. R’lyeh was dangerous, of course, but not as dangerous as it would have been if she’d ever needed to go on her own without someone who had visited before. Abigail thought the scenery was rather lovely.  
   
Cabal returned with a kettle held expertly with potholders. He poured the boiling water into the winter spice blend Abigail had bought at the market earlier that week, watching Parkin out of the corner of his eye.  
   
“I’m, well I’ll admit I’m rather confused. I thought you were a loner. For years you’ve been a loner.” He didn’t think it was fair for Cabal to change the status quo on him when he was too old and lazy to do much thinking on the matter.  
   
Cabal looked at Abigail. “Abigail, would you like to tell him who you are to me?”  
   
She grinned broadly and extended her hand. “I’m Abigail Barrow, and I am his apprentice.”


	21. Part XX – The Sins of the Father

Abigail Barrow found her father’s old home in disrepair. The faeries and the weeds had joined forces to reclaim the garden and the front of the house, setting up an ugly jungle empire of ivy, with one of the clinically insane fae wearing a tiny thimble crown and proclaiming himself king.  
   
“Johannes Cabal!” They hissed as she approached, dozens of tiny forms darting as she approached the gate, followed by choruses of, “It can’t be! Johannes Cabal is dead.” “He’s cold in the ground but roasting in hell!” “Who is it?” “Oh, don’t worry about it! It’s his bast- I mean, his lovely daughter!” “Come now, Lovely Daughter of Johannes Cabal, don’t be afraid.” “It’s okay, we don’t bite!”  
   
“Get out of my way. I have to get in.” She set down her duffle.  
   
They laughed. “What are you going to do, girly?”  
   
“I’ll admit it. I don’t have my father’s commanding personality, or any sort of empirical cruelty to make you fear me.”  
   
“What do you have?” raised a voice over the mad cackles.  
   
She smiled, and that, at least, was reminiscent of their old landlord, as she pulled a can out of her inside coat pocket. “Insecticide and iron nails.”  
   
~~~  
   
The house was full of cobwebs, and the paint was beginning to peel in places. One room had a leak and there was some water damage, but for the most part it had survived the three or so years it had lacked an inhabitant.  
   
 _Or rather_ , it lacked an inhabitant other than the mass of inky blood that had gained a degree of sentience after escaping from the basement. It tried to kill her, almost succeeding twice. Abigail smashed it with one desperate toss of a Napoleon bust grasped frantically at the top of the stairs while she struggled to regain her breath. It splattered and didn’t reform; she burned the remains after the furnace finally rolled to life. Wiping soot from her face, she found the fuses and found them in working order.  
   
About halfway through the less exciting task of cleaning and feeding the spiders to the garden people, she wished there was another failed experiment to fight. At least that was exciting.  
   
Several days later, the place looked habitable, and she had time to sit and think.  
   
He disappeared while she was at university in London. His absence stretched for a month, then two, then six, a year. Two years passed before Abigail’s fears were confirmed. A woman named Ms. Smith came to her in a dream, and informed her that one of her father’s travels had taken him down a path of moral degradation. She told Abigail that his short term goal had been morally detestable, petty, and he’d done horrible things to attain it, even wrecking a few lives in the process. “And if he’d just turned and ran once he had it, he’d still be alive. As it is, your father stayed. He died saving…well, everyone really.”  
   
“Why are you telling me this?” Abigail knew she cried. Even in the dream she could feel the water on her cheeks, and she awoke with a wet pillow.  
   
Ms. Smith had winced. “I just thought you’d like to know that it wasn’t something pointless or ordinary that killed him. He was incredible in the end. He had a plan for surviving. He almost made it.” Ms. Smith had reached out to Abigail’s head in her dream. “He left copies of all his research in a safety deposit box. He wanted me to make sure you got it.”  
   
Abigail had seen it coming for a long time.  
   
It still hurt. For a while, she was angry with him. Years of wondering if his research was more important than she was came to a head, and she seethed in bitter, irrational rage that he hadn’t bothered to save himself. She hated that he’d been there in the first place, wherever ‘there’ was.  
   
Sitting alone in his home, on his furniture, reminded her of that pain. She’d been so focused in the months following his death that she’d barely had time to ponder how much it hurt to never see him again. She was older now, and she knew more about her father than she’d ever wanted to. What he was to the rest of the world didn’t matter. To her, he was still the man who told her stories and dragged her out of a pit of monsters.  
   
Her first wish had been to bring him back. It was rendered an impossible task since the meager scraps of his remains were on a plain ‘deep in the sea and light years away’. She stared up at the stars, sometimes, and wondered if his shattered bones were gazing shallowly at a different set of constellations, with different colored moons and a dying sun in the skyscape.  
   
Abigail’s next goal was to finish what he started.  
   
Over the next week the living room she’d tirelessly cleaned was covered with papers, crystals, and odd devices. Abigail hardly left the room except to eat, sleep, and venture into town. Her own notebooks collected steadily as she combined her work since graduation (four years) with his (over thirty years of data). She was sure she had all the necessary components, but everything needed to be in one place, and she knew the missing links were nested in his work.  
   
He’d been so close.  
   
When it was over, Abigail supposed that she would travel. There was, apparently, a very big universe to see. She wanted to stand on Jurassic soil and ride a camel through the desert, she wanted to crush sorcerers who used their power for evil, walk on the ruins of sunken cities, and she wanted to bring her cure for pain to the people who needed it most (until she decided what its place in the world should be).  
   
By the time she put her pen down, she was smiling at his notebooks and maps, fondly remembering his stories each time she came across the truth in the data and journal entries.  
   
It was time.  
   
~~~  
   
Abigail completed the spell, panting. Her pale hair clung to her forehead as the final words were dragged from her mouth by the heavy hand of some ancient force. She dropped to her knees and waited for her body to adjust. It had taken a lot out of her – more than it had to resurrect the cat and the dead dog. It would still be a while before she could allow herself to sleep; if it worked, the other woman would need to be attended to.  
   
The girl who resembled her mother stirred with breath. Warmth returned to her skin with ugly tingling sensations that left her sobbing in a semi-confused state. Abigail wrapped her in a blanket and waited for the shock to leave. Fetching soup and tea for her patient, Abigail felt her own strength returning. She’d succeeded where her father before her had failed, and it left her feeling as unsteady as the woman who had been dead for about 35 years.  
   
“I had the most dreadful dream…” the woman hissed into her mug, hands shaking. “I fell into the river.”  
   
“And then?” Abigail enquired, heart pounding. This was one thing her father had never recounted, and curiosity was getting the better of her.  
   
“I woke up here.” She ran a hand over her cheek, felt the heat from the mug in her hand. “Please, would you give me a ride to town? I’ll pay you back. You’ve already been so kind but I have to contact my husband and let him know I’m all right.” She smiled. “He’s probably worried.”  
   
“Yes,” Abigail managed, wondering how to continue. She’d known she would have this conversation; she hadn’t thought about exactly how she was going to deal with it or that her heart would be aching so much. “Johannes was very worried.”  
   
The other woman stared back at her, mouth open. “You look familiar.”  
   
She smiled weakly in response. “Everyone tells me I have his eyes.” Fortunately, she had her mother’s way with people.  
   
“Oh god…” She clasped a hand to her mouth. “What’s…what happened?”  
   
“You were asleep for a very long time,” Abigail tried to pretend she was speaking to a child, it would have been easier. “You were sick and your Johannes – my dad – spent his life trying to make you better. My father wanted more than anything to be here…but he died.”  
   
“I don’t understand.”  
   
“It’s a long story,” Abigail admitted, “I suppose I should start with the part where he sold his soul, but I think the proper tale starts with a man talking to a demon on Walpurgisnacht…”  
   
~~~  
   
THE END


End file.
